


cover my grave in daffodils

by Qzil



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Big Bang Challenge, F/M, Funeral Home AU, Graphic Description of Corpses, Medical Inaccuracies, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-16 18:56:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12348654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qzil/pseuds/Qzil
Summary: Castiel Novak's future is bright. A big family, top grades, and an acceptance letter to one of the best medical schools in the country. All is going well until he collapses on stage during his college graduation, dying from a bad heart. He wakes up on the embalming table of one Meg Masters, town mortician, and must decide if he truly wants to continue down the path laid out for him by his parents, or if he wants something different out of life.





	cover my grave in daffodils

**Author's Note:**

> This work includes semi graphic discussions of embalming/corpses. It's a (very very loose) AU of the film Elvis and Anabelle. Big thank you to Lisa for the beautiful artwork for this fic, which will be edited in when I get home from work tonight b/c Tired.

Meg rubbed her eyes as she stumbled down the stairs, carefully gripping the banister to avoid falling. The sun wasn’t even up yet, meaning it was far too early for her taste, but work was work and a body was a body, and people didn’t always die when it was convenient for her.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Meg took a deep breath, straightened her back, and walked through the kitchen toward the front door.

“I would’ve gotten it,” Azazel said quietly, not bothering to open his eyes when she approached. “You’re young. You need sleep.”

“Gonna have to get used to doing this sooner or later,” she told him. “Do you know how far out the van is?”

“Alistair said he was about half an hour when he called, so it should be here soon. Then we can get a couple of hours of sleep before we have to meet with the family and start making arrangements,” he replied.

Meg rolled her eyes. Normally, corpse van drivers had an absurdly high turnover rate, but her uncle had been doing the job for as long as she could remember. He was one of the few people who seemed to really enjoy it, and she couldn’t fault him for it. She had no right to judge someone else’s job, after all.

She noticed her father swaying a bit when he pushed away from the wall. Frowning, Meg took a step forward to help steady him. “Where’s your cane?”

“I don’t need it. I feel fine. I’m just tired, is all,” her father told her. There was a hint of anger in his voice, so Meg backed off, biting her tongue to keep her words to herself. Her father was most certainly not fine, and hadn’t been for quite a while.

She kept her mouth shut until his cell phone rang. The cheery pop tune sounded far too loud in the quiet of the early morning, and out of place in a house such as hers.

“That Uncle Al?” she guessed. Azazel nodded and flipped his phone open.

“Hey, Al. You round the front? Uh huh. Okay. Yes, Meg and I are here.” Putting his hand over the receiver, he glanced at Meg. “Go help your uncle unload the body. I’ll wait here.”

Meg simply nodded and stepped out into the cold morning air. Her uncle was already out of the van and standing at the back doors, a small smile on his face.

“You look lovely this morning,” he said. Despite the cold and the hour, there was a smile on his face that reached his strange, pale eyes. His voice, more like a croon, instantly relaxed her, and she felt her worries about her father drain away.

“I look like shit, but thanks,” Meg replied, smiling back as she helped her uncle unload the body. “Straight from the hospital?”

“Yes indeed. Looks like Mr. Monroe won’t be yelling at anymore children for not running fast enough in gym class,” Alistair said.

“Well, that’s good for the High School, at least. And they’ll have all summer to find his replacement,” Meg said. “Help me get him up the steps? Dad and I’ll take care of it from there.”

“Of course,” Alistair replied. “Anything for my favorite niece.”

Meg smiled wider at that. “I’m your only niece.”

“You’re still my favorite,” Alistair told her. “Now, come. You’ll need some sleep before you meet with the family. I happen to think you’re radiant, but the grieving widow might feel differently if her funeral director is wearing pajama pants.”

Laughing, Meg helped her uncle unload the body from the van and wheel it inside to be put in her and her father’s workspace. In a couple of hours she and her father would meet with the family and find out if Mr. Monroe had had an end of life plan, or if his wife would be handling things. Regardless, she wanted to be well rested for it.

It wouldn’t do to make a mistake while embalming a body, after all.

.

Taking a deep breath, Castiel Novak adjusted his tie and took one last look around the room that had been his for the last four years. After today, he would be leaving this apartment behind forever. College was over. Graduation was in just a few short hours, and medical school loomed ahead of him like a great beast, casting a shadow over his future.

“You don’t look so good, brother. Nervous?” his elder brother, Gabriel, asked as he strode into the room. His brother’s dark blond hair lay flat for once, obviously tamed by their mother, and he was dressed handsomely in a dark blue suit and tie.

“I threw up twice this morning,” Castiel replied. Cursing when he realized that he’d tied his tie on backward, he went to re-do it.

“Oh, leave it,” Gabriel said. “No one will see it under the gown, anyway, and it’ll drive Mother crazy.”

“I’d like to avoid driving her crazy,” Castiel said. “She has enough stress.”

“She deserves a little bit of rebellion,” Gabriel said dryly. “Besides, no one will see. Think of it as our little secret.”

Castiel smiled weakly at his brother. His heart had been hammering all day from nerves. In fact, it had been hammering on and off from nerves for weeks, ever since finals. The stress of finishing school, of receiving letters back from the medical schools he’d applied to, of late night study sessions and his mother’s voice ringing in his ears, had all taken their toll on him. Truly, Castiel was looking forward to the first good, long sleep he’d gotten in months, and eating a hearty, filling meal without regurgitating it. Most of all, he was looking forward to a few low stress weeks back home before he left for medical school.

What he wasn’t looking forward to was the twenty hour car ride back home. When  he’d chosen to go to college out of state, his mother had been less than thrilled, but had agreed that it was the best university out of all the ones he’d gotten into, so she’d let him go. Originally, he’d flown out there, and had planned to fly back once the semester was over. His father, however, had insisted on a road trip with the whole family, which meant Castiel would be spending twenty hours crammed into his father’s old minivan with his siblings.

“You don’t have to go back home, you know,” Gabriel said, interrupting his thoughts. “You could come stay with Anna and I for the summer.”

“Mom wants me home. She doesn’t know how much more time she’ll get to spend with me now,” Castiel argued. “That’s why I agreed to a road trip.”

“You know that she just wants to keep an eye on you, to make sure you’re doing what she says,” Gabriel shot back. “You know that I know that. Do you even want to go to medical school?”

“Of course,” Castiel replied automatically. “To be a doctor is the most rewarding experience in the world.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “You should do that in front of Anna. You really do a spot on imitation of our mother. Anyway, come on. We should get you over to the school.”

“I just hope I can stay awake through the whole ceremony. I’m just so tired. It’s hard to stand.”

Gabriel gave him a light slap on the shoulder. “Finals will do that to you. Don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon.”

.

It was far too bright.

Castiel began to worry that there was something seriously wrong with him as he sat there, listening to the speeches. His vision kept wavering in and out of focus, and he could feel his fingers tingling, as if they were falling asleep. He felt both too hot and too cold at once, and the sun was so bright it was almost blinding. His mouth felt as if it was stuffed full of cotton, and he could barely hear the words coming from the stage. There was an odd pain in his chest, but he barely registered it. He’d been so exhausted the last couple of weeks that random pains were nothing new.

He only knew when it was time to stand when the rest of his class rose from their chairs. It was hard to hear the speakers, and he suddenly felt very hot in his graduation robes. From nerves, he supposed. Still, he diligently walked forward and took his place in line to receive his diploma, assuring himself that soon it would be over, and he could have a nice, long nap.

It was so hard to move forward, though, so incredibly hard to put one foot in front of the other. His name was called, and Castiel had to concentrate completely on putting one foot in front of the other. He managed to successfully take his diploma, shake a hand, and reached up to move his tassel from one side of his graduation cap to the other when his vision completely tunneled and he felt himself falling. The ground rushed up to meet him through a sea of fog, but the only thing he was completely aware of was the fierce pain in his chest and, distantly, his mother screaming.

Then, nothing.

.

Meg groaned when the phone went off. Reaching over, she turned the volume down on the radio before she reached to pick it up. Thankfully, her father answered it before she could. Still, she kept her music off as she continued to make lunch for the two of them. It was nothing fancy, just chicken soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, but nice for an unseasonably cold afternoon.

Her father walked into the kitchen a few minutes later, leaning heavily on his cane, and Meg figured that it was a bad day for him, maybe made worse by the phone call.

“Bad news?” she asked.

“Depends on who you are,” her father answered. “Get changed after lunch. We’ve got a meeting with a family later.”

“So, bad news for them,” Meg said, ladling the soup into bowls for her and her father.

“They’re ready to run the obituary after they talk to us. But the kid died out of state, I think, so they’re shipping his body in on ice.” Azazel shook his head and sighed. “It’s a tragedy, really.”

“A kid?” Meg asked. “Anyone I know?”

“Maybe. He’s a couple of years younger than you, I think. Did you know a Castiel Novak when you were in school?”

Meg pulled out a chair and pursed her lips, mentally going through all of the people that she’d known from High School. She’d only had a couple of close friends when she was there, since most people thought that she was a little weird. And, of course, nobody had ever wanted to come over to her house for sleepovers, since there was a decent chance of a dead body being laid out in one of the viewing rooms or down in the workroom. Most of the people that she’d hung around with had moved out of their small town for college and had never come back, preferring to make their new homes in larger cities and to leave the small town they’d grown up in behind.

She remembered the name Novak, though. She couldn’t remember a Castiel, exactly, but she remembered other Novak siblings. They had been pretty plentiful, with one in almost every grade when she was in school. The classic large, Catholic family.

“I had a Gabriel Novak and an Anna Novak in my grade,” Meg finally said. “I don’t think I ever talked to Castiel, though.”

“It’s a shame,” Azazel sighed. “So young. All that life ahead of him.”

“Well, it’s happened. No use crying about it, not from us, anyway. Both viewing rooms are empty right now, so they can pick.” Meg wrinkled her nose. “Do you think they’ll want the one with a piano?”

Azazel shrugged. “Maybe. They might not be the type to want live music.”

Meg hoped they weren’t. She hated having to play the piano at viewings.

“Anyway,” Azazel continued. “You’ll be right there with me for the consult.”

.

Meg vaguely recognized Naomi Novak. Meg and Anna had both been on the cheerleading squad in High School, something that Anna had told Meg that Naomi had never quite approved of, and Meg recognized the woman from the few times she had picked Anna up after practice. Her hair was darker than her daughter’s, and her eyes harder, despite the fact that they were filled with tears.

Chuck Novak, however, she had met quite a few times. He was usually the one to pick his children up from events, since he worked from home. He’d even driven her back to the funeral home a few times throughout High School while her father was stuck at a doctor’s appointment or in a meeting. Normally, the Novak patriarch had an almost dreamlike look on his face, as if he was stuck in the universe of his latest novel. Now, however, he looked somber, almost in shock.

Meg, quiet as ever, took diligent notes as her father talked to the parents. Her father had already shown them caskets, and they’d already picked one out, a moderately priced bronze one. And, thankfully, they’d picked the slightly smaller viewing room, the one without the piano, and already set dates. The Novaks mostly ignored her as they talked with her father. Near the end, though, Naomi turned to look at her, and Meg saw fresh tears gathering in her eyes.

“Meg Masters? That name sounds familiar,” Naomi said. “Did you…did you know Castiel?”

“I didn’t, ma’am,” Meg said quietly. “I was in the same year as Gabriel and Anna. I knew of him, though. I’m very sorry for your loss. Gabe always said he was a good kid.”

Naomi chuckled. “He was. He just wanted to make me proud, and I…I think it pushed him into working too hard, which lead to his health problems, and then…”

Naomi started to cry freely, and Chuck put his arm around his wife’s shoulders.

“He should get in later tonight. We had his body put on ice, since it happened up at college. But we wanted him to be buried at home, and, well…” Chuck trailed off, and then took a deep breath. “This funeral home prepared my grandfather, and my great grandfather, and Naomi’s parents as well. This is where Cas should be done, too. You are the best, after all.”

Meg swallowed hard. “Thank you, for trusting us with this. We promise that we’ll take care of him.”

“I know you will,” Naomi hiccupped. “I’m sorry, I just…”

“It’s perfectly alright, Mrs. Novak,” Azazel soothed. “It’s a difficult time. Feel free to call us at any hour.”

“His suit,” Chuck interrupted. “The one that he…that’s the only one he has… _had._ If you could keep it intact, so we could bury him in it…”

“We’ll do it,” Meg promised.

.

Her uncle brought the body by later. Azazel was feeling poorly, so Alistair was the one to help her wheel it into their workroom and heave it off the gurney. Still in the bag, it looked more like a sack of laundry than a human corpse.

“You gonna be okay here all by yourself?” Alastair asked. Meg rolled her eyes.

“I’m fine, uncle Al,” she said. The room was so cold that she could just barely see her breath when she spoke. “I’ve been around dead bodies my whole life.”

“This boy was your schoolmate, wasn’t he?” Alistair pressed. “That makes it tough.”

“I didn’t know him,” Meg said truthfully. “He was younger. I only ever saw him in passing.”

“Still, you give your old uncle Al a call if you need anything.” He gave her a light pat on the shoulder and turned to collect his gurney, cursing when the wheels collapsed.

“At least it waited until we had the body off of it to break this time,” Meg pointed out. Alistair snorted.

“Remarkable, really,” he said dryly. “Anyway, I’ll let you get to it. Tell your dad to call me when he’s feeling a bit better. I’ll drive him to the doctor’s.”

Meg gave her uncle a quick hug. “Thanks. I’ll let him know.”

She waited until her uncle had left before she turned back to the project at hand. It was already well past dinnertime, so she didn’t want to start embalming the body just yet. Still, there was preliminary work to do, and she figured she could at least get him stripped and washed before she came down to do the embalming tomorrow morning. The viewing was scheduled for the day after that, and the family had already picked out a casket and gotten him a spot in the family funeral plot.

Sighing, Meg pulled on a pair of gloves and, for extra precaution, threw a leather apron on over her clothes. She had changed after the meeting with Castiel’s family, shedding her practical suit for a comfortable pair of jeans and purple t-shirt. She had a sweater hanging in the workroom for the occasions that she’d have to been in there longer than a couple of minutes without protective gear, so she pulled that on as well.

Warm, comfortable, and protected from any errant fluids that might leak out, Meg reached to unzip the body bag.

She was careful, as always, drawing the zipper down slowly just in case. She always had a general idea of what a body would look like based off of how they died, but it was still a shock to unzip the bag or lift the sheet and see half a face staring back at you, or glazed, cloudy eyes looking up into nothingness. She breathed a sigh of relief when nothing like that happened. Castiel was intact, his eyes mostly closed by someone in the hospital morgue. They were opened slightly at the bottom, of course, without glue to keep them completely closed, but they weren’t sunken in at all yet. She took a deep breath, curiously noticing that the usual smell of dead body was absent, and pulled the zipper down to his chest, barely stifling a laugh when she saw that his tie was on backward.

“Jesus, Cas, could nobody tie it for you?” she huffed. Of course, she didn’t expect an answer, since he was dead.

Pausing for a moment, Meg let herself look at his face. She’d only seen him in passing in the hallways, and had never exchanged more than a hello with him the few times that Gabriel had offered to drive her home after school when he was taking his siblings. But he’d always been an afterthought, nothing but Gabriel and Anna’s baby brother with bright blue eyes that still looked too big for his face, despite the fact that he was nearly sixteen when she’d graduated.

In the years since she’d seen him, his face had lost the last of its baby fat, giving rise to a strong, square jaw with a slightly cleft chin. In the dim light of her workroom, his hair looked darker than she knew it was, and it suck up every which way from being bumped around in the body bag. His shoulders had broadened as well, although he was still slender.

Meg sighed. “Jesus, Cas, you look like a mess. Don’t worry, though, I’ll fix you up. You’ll look good for your viewing, I promise.”

Giving him a small smile, Meg leaned over and gently smoothed his hair down with a gloved hand. He was cold, of course, but it felt like rigor mortis had passed, which meant it would be a lot easier for her to strip him down, even if he was dead weight.

She kept smoothing his hair, even though she knew that she would have to wash it and re-style it, anyway, and looked down at his face again. Meg was surprised at just how handsome he had become. He’d grown up, just like the rest of them had, and suddenly she was struck by how very sad it was that he had died when he still had so much life ahead of him, and on his graduation day no less.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” she murmured. “It really sucks.”

Then, seized by a sudden impulse, she leaned down and gently kissed his forehead. Eyes widening with the realization of what she’d just done, Meg pulled herself away and glanced around to make sure that her father hadn’t come to the doorway, freezing when she heard a gasp.

Turning her gaze back to Castiel, she saw that his eyes had flown open. His body began to jerk slightly, as if he was struggling to breathe.

For the first time in her life, Meg sprung back from the corpse and screamed. Castiel sprung up, too, sitting up in his body bag for a moment. His eyes were wide and locked onto hers as he drew a deep, shuddering breath. They stared at each other for a moment, Meg shaking as she pressed herself against the wall.

Then, Castiel fell back with a loud thump, eyes closed.

Breathing hard, Meg kept herself pressed against the wall as she willed her body to stop shaking. She had never, not once in her life, screamed in fear or surprise around a dead body. They moved or made noises all the time, simple muscle spasms and groans as gasses escaped. But that had been no muscle spasm, had not simply been gas leaving the body.

He’d woken up.

Still trembling, Meg crossed the room as fast as she could and nearly collapsed onto her worktable as she lowered her head to Castiel’s chest.

His heartbeat was faint, but there.

“Holy shit,” she breathed. “Holy shit, holy goddamned shit. Dad! Dad!”

“Meg, are you alright? I heard a scream,” her father called. Meg heard the thump of his cane and figured he must be hurrying toward her. Springing away from Castiel, she stumbled to the door and fumbled with it, falling into the hallway when it opened.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, but dad you gotta call 911. He’s alive. He’s breathing and his heart’s beating and he sat and up and looked at me and oh fuck, oh fuck he’s not dead,” she babbled. “We have to call 911 and--blankets! It’s too cold in there but we shouldn’t move him and what if he dies again ohgod ohgod.”

“Meg, breathe,” Azazel instructed. “He’s dead, sweetie. You know bodies twitch and groan. It’s just air and gasses escaping. Muscle spasms from hitting something.”

“He sat up and looked at me!” Meg shrieked. “That’s not a muscle spasm! Call the damn cops!”

Just then, Castiel’s body gave a massive shudder and he vomited in his sleep. Meg thanked God that his head had lolled to the side when he’d fallen back down, otherwise he would’ve been dead all over again.

“Shit,” Azazel breathed. “Meg, you’re faster than me. Go call an ambulance. I’ll make the room warmer.”

Meg shook, rooted to the spot.

“Move, Meg!” Azazel barked, giving her a light swat with his cane for good measure. Shaking her head to clear it, Meg heaved herself off the ground and stumbled as fast as she could to the kitchen, nearly ripping the phone off the wall as she pulled it off the receiver. She dialed 911 with shaking fingers and tried to calm her breathing.

“911, what is your emergency?”

“I’m at the Masters Funeral Home. One of our bodies just woke up. He wasn’t really dead. I need you to send an ambulance immediately before he dies for real. He woke up on the table and I don’t know what to do for him because I deal with dead people not live ones I don’t know how to save lives I don’t know what to do to make sure he doesn’t die again,” she said in a rush.

“Miss, I’m sorry, you said that--”

“He woke back up! He wasn’t dead and he woke back up and just send a damn ambulance!” Meg yelled.

“Listen, just keep him breathing. We’ll be right there,” the person on the other line instructed. “What can you tell me about what happened?”

“He just woke up,” Meg repeated. “I hadn’t even read the report yet. He woke up and he breathed and he threw up.”

“Just keep him breathing. Do you know CPR?”

Meg had never been more grateful that they’d all gotten certified in High School. “Yes.”

“Good. Do it if you have to. Someone’s on their way.”

“Oh, okay, good, thank you,” she babbled, hanging up the phone. She rested her forehead on the cool plastic for a minute, thinking that she probably should’ve stayed on the line, when her legs gave out again and she found herself on the floor.

She groped around on the counter without looking until she found her cell phone. It took her two tries to enter her password since she was shaking so badly, but after another deep breath it subsided and she was able to open her phone. Frantically scrolling through her contacts, she found Gabriel’s number and prayed that he was still awake.

“Meg?” he answered. He sounded as though he had been crying.

“Gabriel, thank god. You have to come over,” she told him. “Bring your mom. He--he isn’t dead.”

“Meg, what are you talking about?” Gabriel asked. “This isn’t funny, and you’re supposed to be a profess--”

“This isn’t a prank, Gabe. He woke up on the table. I called an ambulance already and they’re on their way but you guys should know. He’s alive. He woke up on my table. Scared the shit out of me. Just come over. If you’re quick you can meet the ambulance.”

She hung up without further conversation and wobbled toward the front door. The viewing rooms were dark, the chairs put away and the piano covered. Opening the door, she took deep breaths of the cool night air until she was calm and could think straight.

This whole situation was bad. She shouldn’t have hung up on 911. She shouldn’t have called Gabe.

She shouldn’t have _kissed a corpse._

A corpse that she had no relation to, anyway. She’d kissed her mother’s body on the forehead before they had closed the casket, had kissed her grandfather on the cheek before he’d been closed up, too. So had her father and her brother and most of their family. It was normal it was one of your own. Almost expected in their household.

But a stranger?

She hoped he didn’t remember when he woke back up. If he woke back up. There was always the possibility that he would die for good in the hospital and wind right back up on her table, wrapped up in a body bag and ready for embalming.

She stood there, staring into the night until she heard the sirens and saw the flashing lights as the ambulance pulled into her driveway, followed by a cop car. Less than ten seconds later, another car skidded to a stop behind them, and she saw Naomi Novak emerge from the passenger seat.

“Is it true?” she shouted at Meg. Her hair was wet, as if she’d just gotten out of the shower, and she was wearing nothing but a soft cotton nightgown with a coat thrown over it and a pair of slippers. “Is it true?”

Meg only nodded as the crew slid out of the ambulance.

“You’ll have to wait here, Mrs. Novak,” one of them said gently. Meg recognized him from school. Garth was as tall and skinny as ever, but his face was missing its usual goofy expression. Instead, he was entirely focused on the task at hand. “Meg?”

“I’ll take you,” she said quickly as she led them through the house. The workroom was warmer, and her father had zipped the body bag back up to Castiel’s chest and put a blanket over it for extra warmth.

“Good going,” Garth told him. “C’mon, guys, let’s get him out of here. Meg, you shouldn’t have called them. Not yet.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” she said truthfully. “You try seeing a dead body come back to life and tell me that you think straight.”

Garth sighed. “Fair enough. But the cops are gonna want to talk to you. See you later.”

“Later,” she said. Both she and her father watched as Garth and his coworkers wheeled Castiel out of their house. Stupidly, she wondered if they would get their blanket back.

“I’d say we deserve a drink after that,” Azazel finally said. Nodding, Meg helped her father through the door, stopping when she saw that there were still lights outside. When she walked into the front of the house, she saw one of the officers standing there sheepishly.

“We’re going to have to talk about what happened for an official report,” he said. His voice was apologetic, but Meg didn’t care.

“He woke up,” she said for what felt like the thousandth time that night. “I went to go start work on him so we could embalm him early tomorrow morning. He opened his eyes and shot up. Then he fell back down and vomited. If you want me to go over it again, you can come back tomorrow.”

“I can see that you’re a bit…shaken,” the officer said gently. “Alright. If we need anything else we’ll come by in a couple of days.”

Meg nodded and shut the door behind him. When she got back to the kitchen, she saw that her father had already opened a beer for her. Noticing she was still wearing her gloves and apron, Meg pulled them off and threw them on the table before she sat down.

She and her father sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping on their beers, before Azazel looked at her and smiled.

“Well, at least he woke up before you started embalming him.”

Meg barked out a laugh. “Thanks, dad.”

.

Lying back in his cot in the hospital, Castiel stared up at the ceiling and tried to block out the soft beeping of the machines around him. If he looked at the door, he could just make out the forms of his mother and father arguing. His mother had been insistent on Castiel staying in the hospital, repeatedly telling her husband that their son wasn’t ready to go home yet, despite the doctors telling them that he was in the clear.

Personally, Castiel couldn’t wait to go home. The hospital was far too bright, since the lights never truly shut off, and smelled strongly of both sickness and disinfectant at the same time. He was sick of the food, sick of being strapped to monitors and poked and prodded by doctors, sick of his mother treating him as though he was going to fall over and die again if he did so much as walk to the bathroom by himself.

When he’d first woken up in the hospital, he’d been confused, in pain, and very, very cold. He still couldn’t remember anything beyond lining up at his graduation. Everything after that was a blur.

Everything except for a pair of wide, hazel eyes surrounded by a gray-green swirl of color.

He didn’t remember much from after he woke up, either. According to his father, he’d wavered in and out of consciousness for a couple of days, only waking up for a couple of minutes at a time. He could vaguely recall voices and the beeping from the machines, but not much else. When he’d finally woken up for good, it had been to an overly cheerful nurse changing his catheter bag while she whistled a jaunty tune.

That was the last moment of peace he had. A minute later, his room was filled with doctors and nurses and his family. His mother had been hysterical, crying with a mixture of exhaustion and relief, while his father had been his ever-dreamy self, and had clearly been very stoned. Castiel really couldn’t blame him.

Once the initial rush was over, he was finally able to learn just _what_ had happened to him. After spouting a bunch of medical jargon, the doctor had finally sat down and told Castiel in plain language that, due to a mixture of stress, inadequate diet, excessive vomiting, and far too much caffeine, his heart had given out. When he’d been put on ice, his body temperature was so low that most of his systems had shut down, and his breathing had been so shallow that, to most people, he’d looked like he was still dead.

“You were probably only actually, legally dead for a minute or so,” the doctor had explained. “It’s rare that we see something like this. You’re very, very lucky, son.”

Castiel certainly didn’t feel lucky. Mostly, he felt very sore. 

The door opened, yanking Castiel from his thoughts. He slowly sat up in bed, smiling when he saw his father walk through the door without his mother. Chuck had always been the calmer of the two, the one to that let Castiel and his siblings slide around the rules their mother put in place, and had been the only person in the family to handle his son’s resurrection in a calm, collected manner. Castiel knew that it was most likely due to the fact that his father was perpetually drunk or stoned, but right at the moment, he didn’t mind one bit.

“We’re gonna take you home tomorrow,” Chuck told him, settling down at the foot of the bed. “Your mother wanted you to stay a couple more days for monitoring, but the doctor says that you’re all good. We’ll pick up all your meds tonight so they’re all ready for when you come home. Anna and Gabe moved your stuff back into your old room for you, and they’re gonna stay a couple of days to help create a buffer between you and your mother. Balt couldn’t get any more time off work, so he headed back to England late last night.”

“How are Hael, Hannah, and Alfie doing?” Castiel asked. Hannah was only a year younger than him, while Hael and Alfie, twins that had been a year ahead of him in school, weren’t close with the family. Hael had moved to the middle of the country the day after graduation, and where Hael went, Alfie went, dutifully following his twin. They had never visited, and rarely called, always choosing to speak only to their father or their siblings. Last Castiel had heard, they’d joined a sort of farming commune, growing their own food and living in a large farmhouse with a dozen other people, doing odd jobs around town to supplement their income. Hael painted. Alfie made furniture. As far as Castiel knew, they were happy.

Far happier than he had been in the last couple of years, anyway.

“Hannah’s worried sick, of course,” Chuck said. “She’s finishing up some stuff at school before she comes home for the summer. The twins…well, your mother’s turned their attention on them, since she can’t exactly get to you in here. She’s convinced they’re in some sort of cult. Honestly, she should remember what I was like at that age. They’re happy, and the environment they’re in isn’t exactly cult-like. Not that the cult I was in when I was younger looked like one from the outside, but still. It’s more like an artist’s commune, I guess. But you know your mother. Anyway, they’re heading back tomorrow. Hael brought you a plant.”

Castiel chose to ignore his father’s comment about being in a cult. There were some things he preferred not to know about his father. “Are there still reporters hanging around?”

“Sadly, yes,” his father said. There was a slight twinkle in his eyes when spoke again. “But we’re gonna sneak you out to avoid them. Your first adventure.”

“And my last, if mom gets her way,” Castiel said sadly.

“Let me handle your mother,” Chuck insisted. “The doctors said that you should be back to normal in a couple of weeks. Besides, she can’t keep you at home forever. Med school.”

Dread settled in Castiel’s chest at his father’s words. Medical school meant stress, meant constant hours of studying and staying up late and repeating the whole process over and over, only worse, since medical school would be indefinitely harder than his college courses.

Chuck rose and leaned over to give Castiel’s shoulder a light slap of encouragement. “Don’t worry, son, we’ll take care of everything.”

.

Tucked up in his childhood bed, Castiel resisted the urge to use some very unkind words in his mother’s presence.

“I’m fine,” he insisted as his mother hovered in the doorway. “I feel absolutely fine.”

“If you’re sure, maybe you should get a jump start on studying,” Naomi suggested. She was dressed for work, but her hair was down. “I can take more time off if you need me to.”

“I’m fine,” he repeated. “Besides, I have dad and Anna and Gabe practically waiting on me hand and foot.”

Naomi frowned. “Well, if you’re sure. When you get home, I want us to start going over what you need for school. I started looking for apartments for you already, and we need to start making lists of what you’ll need.”

Castiel bit back a groan. He’d been home for one day and his mother was already jumping back into school business. He knew that she only wanted him to be successful, but he still had to hold his tongue and resist the urge to remind her that the doctor didn’t want him under any stress.

“Maybe we can put it off for a couple of days,” he suggested instead. Naomi frowned deeper.

“If you’re as fine as you say you are then you can think about your future and prepare for it,” Naomi told him. Her face softened for a moment, and with it her voice. “Get some rest, Cas.”

“Sure, mom.”

He let out a sigh of relief when Naomi left, gently closing the door behind her. The minute he heard her car start, Castiel threw his blanket off and slowly stood, eventually making his way over to the plant Hael had brought him from her commune.

It was quite pretty, just a single flower with a spiky stem and deep red petals. He had no idea why she’d chosen it, aside from the fact that it was quite pretty, but then, he hadn’t really had the chance to look up what it was yet.

Turning the pot around, he saw an arrow pointed toward the bottom of the pot. Curious, he lifted it and found a small, folded piece of paper taped to the bottom.

_Cas,_

_Red is for passion, generally, so I picked a random red one. I’m not even sure what it is. Flowers were always your thing, not mine, but it was pretty so I figured you’d like it. Anyway, the point of this (and the reason I hid it) is that I figured you could use some advice, and I really couldn’t get to you without mom. There isn’t a phone out at the farm, and the payphone in town isn’t working. I don’t know how long it’ll take them to fix it, since it isn’t exactly a priority, so this is my best chance._

_Regardless, you should sit down and think about your future. If you really want to go to medical school for you, then go. If you’re only going because mom’s been pushing you toward this since you first expressed interest in how the body works, then don’t. If you’re not sure, think about it._ Really _think about it._

_If you need to get away, or if you decide not to go and she freaks out, you’re more than welcome at the farm. Gabe has directions. He’s even visited a couple of times, so if you think it’s a cult like mom does, he can assure you that it’s not._

_I’m almost out of paper, so I’ll wrap this up. Feel better. Think about your life. Don’t do something just because mom wants you to. She loves us, but she’s a pusher, and I don’t want her to push you to the point of winding up in a hospital bed again._

_The flower should be big enough to plant soon. Do that for me._

_Love,_

_Hael (and Alfie, too, but he’s distracting mom while I write this)_

Castiel read the letter twice before he re-folded it and securely taped it back in place so his mother wouldn’t find it. He delicately touched the petals of the flower and looked at the wall above his desk. The walls were a generic light blue, and covered with anatomy posters and certificates he’d gotten from competitions in High School. He stared at one chart that showed the cardiovascular system in rich reds and blues, the medical terms printed in clear, blocky font.

He couldn’t remember a time that he hadn’t worked toward becoming a doctor. Some of his earliest memories included parroting the names of bones back to his mother while she quizzed him, and his chest involuntarily warmed at the memories of her praise when he’d correctly named all the bones of the hand. But before he’d died, he’d never sat and questioned if it was what he truly wanted.

But ever since his miraculous recovery, it was the only thing on his mind. He wanted to rip down the anatomy charts from his walls. He wanted to open a medical book and lose himself in the comforting information that he knew backward and forward in order to distract himself. He wanted to lie down in bed and not move for hours.

He wanted his mother to stop hovering over him and his father to do something other than give him a stoned, sleepy look and promise that Naomi would come around.

Instead of doing any of those things, he headed down the stairs to see if he could scrounge up a sandwich.

Gabriel was sitting at the table when he arrived, typing diligently on his laptop. Castiel’s older brother had graduated with a degree in business, and, with a little help from their parents, had opened his own candy store. His mother hadn’t been one hundred percent happy about it, having hoped that Gabriel would go into a higher-paying career, but supported his dream none the less, as long as he worked hard. Anna lived above the store with Gabe and helped him out on occasion, but her job as a journalist for the local paper in their city kept her busy.

“Hey, baby brother,” Gabriel greeted without looking up. “Just checking on the cameras. I’ve gotta go back soon, though. Maybe tomorrow or the day after. I can’t take anymore time off.”

“I understand,” Castiel said, slowly lowering himself into a chair. “Before you go, is there a chance that I could get an egg sandwich?”

Gabriel laughed. “Coming right up.”

“Where did Anna and dad go?” he asked.

“Dad’s on the phone with his publisher and locked himself in his office. Anna volunteered to go down to the Masters’ place and straighten some stuff out. We had to return your casket,” Gabriel said cheerfully. “One egg or two on your sandwich?”

“Two,” Castiel requested. Gabriel had never been one to beat around the bush, and he had a perpetually cheerful attitude, two things Castiel was grateful for after being under his mother’s watchful eye. “I thought people were buried in coffins.”

“Nope. Caskets nowadays.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Oh, yeah. Caskets are those big, bulky rectangular ones. Coffins are the old style, tapered at the bottom. Think Dracula. Meg went on a whole rant about it once in High School, once,” Gabriel informed Castiel. He pulled the bread out of the cupboard and cracked the eggs.

“Meg?”

“The girl at the funeral home. Man, you should’ve heard her when she called. She sounded near hysterical. Must’ve thought the zombie apocalypse was starting when you sprung back to life on her table.” Gabriel chuckled and shook his head. “You nearly gave her a heart attack.”

“I’d call and apologize, but I think I can be let off the hook for it, what with the circumstances,” Castiel said dryly.

Gabriel nodded as the smell of eggs filled the kitchen. “Dying’s a pretty good excuse.”

.

Groaning, Meg sank into the couch in the living room, glaring at the television remote. If she wanted it, she would have to get back up. But her legs hurt far too much for that.

“You’re far too young to be groaning like that,” Azazel commented, sitting down next to her. Meg glared at her father.

“I am not built for this,” Meg complained. In the three weeks since The Incident, as they had taken to calling it, they’d only had one body. Azazel had insisted on using their downtime to clean out the attic, a chore that, really, only Meg could do. Her father couldn’t lug old furniture and heavy boxes down the stairs with his bad leg. Even with her uncle’s help moving some of the heavier pieces, Meg was still sore and ready to sit for several days.

However, her father had been right. The attic _had_ needed a good cleaning. The old room had been neglected for years, ever since she and Tom had gotten old enough where they no longer needed a playroom that was far away from the dead and their mourners.

She was sore, tired, and never wanted to move again, but the attic looked better than it ever had. The big window that overlooked the backyard and old family graveyard was clean and clear, the floors shone, and the old bedroom set that her father had decided to leave up there was free of dust.

“You’ve moved three hundred pound bodies without this much complaining,” Azazel pointed out.

“They were easier than that,” Meg countered.

“No, they weren’t.”

Meg fought to keep herself from smiling. “No, they weren’t.”

Her father reached for the remote and turned the television on, flicking through the channels until he reached the evening news. Meg wrinkled her nose, but settled more comfortably into the couch none of the less. Her father always quickly grew bored of the news, and she figured he’d switch it in a second.

Her heart dropped when the report changed and footage of Castiel leaving his house showed up on the screen. The report was a short one, since it was such an old story, more of an update on how he was doing. Anna had told her that Castiel had refused to do any sort of interview about his experience, so she figured a few shots of him walking around was the best that the news could do.

“Please turn it off,” Meg groaned. “I am so sick of hearing about this.”

“At least the reporters have finally cleared out,” Azazel grumbled. The day after The Incident, Meg had woken up to a bunch of calls from the local papers and news station looking for her side of the story. She had refused them all, too, preferring to forget the time a body had woken up on her table. She had finally relented when Becky Rosen, who wrote for a small paper the next town over, had cornered her in the grocery story. Meg had told the girl the truth, and then politely requested that she move, or else she would punch her in the face.

That had sent Becky running off, and people had finally stopped calling her.

“At least it hasn’t hurt business,” Azazel pointed out. “If anything, it seems to have given us publicity.”

“We’re the only funeral home for miles,” Meg pointed out.

“Publicity is still never a bad thing.”

Meg groaned again and heaved herself up from the couch. It was still mostly light out, the sun barely starting to set, so she knew that she had time.

“I’m going to go visit mom,” she said.

Azazel glanced outside. “Take a flashlight with you.”

Meg merely nodded and headed out the backdoor, grabbing a sweater as she went. It was warm out, being nearly summer, but the nights still turned cold. She grabbed a flashlight, too, even though she knew she could find her way home from the family graveyard with her eyes closed.

The walk was a short one, with the old family graveyard starting only a couple of dozen yards from the house. It was surrounded by an old, low fence that was badly in need of repair. Every year her father told her they would fix it up, and every year the project wound up on the backburner, pushed down on the list for other, more important chores or due to work.

The oldest graves were at the very front, with some of the headstones being so old that she could no longer read the names of the Masters that had come before her. Their family had owned the land for a long time, her earliest ancestors made up of famers and barber-surgeons before they had gone into caring for the dead, and most of them were buried on the safety of the family land.

She made her way to the back of the graveyard, past the graves of her grandparents and great grandparents, and clicked on her flashlight. The sun was nearly gone, the last rays stretching over the headstones, briefly lighting up the visible names before they were cast into darkness.

Meg knelt before her mother’s grave and diligently pulled the weeds from the front. It had been a while since she last visited, and with a smile she noticed that few buttons had sprung up around the headstone. Lilith Masters had once had a fine garden, admired all around the town, but since her death it had gone largely neglected. Meg herself had a black thumb, as her father liked to call it, and Azazel was no great gardener himself. Still, the wildflowers that her mother had planted were ever creeping outward from the house, flourishing without the help of humans.

Meg talked as she weeded, as she always did, filling her mother in on the events of the last few weeks. She knew, logically, that Lilith could not hear her, but it still gave her piece to sit over the body of her mother and talk about her day.

When she was finished, Meg picked up the flashlight and began to make her way back to the house. Almost absently, she wondered how her mother would’ve dealt with a body springing back up on an embalming table. Lilith herself hadn’t dealt with the gory details of cleaning a body. Instead, she had preferred to help her husband make arrangements, and to play the piano in the larger viewing room if the family decided they wanted live music. But she had, on occasion, helped her husband dress the bodies or put makeup on them. In Meg’s memory, her mother was soft spoken and full of life, and, Meg figured, would’ve handled it with little fuss.

Lilith Masters had seldom been surprised by anything.

Sighing, Meg set the flashlight back into the drawer when she made it back to the house. Passing through the living room, she saw that her father had fallen asleep in front of the television again, his hand still loosely gripping his cane.

Covering him with a blanket, Meg turned the television off and headed upstairs to spend a quiet evening alone, determined to put The Incident out of her mind.

.

Gritting his teeth, Castiel tried to ignore his mother. For the past few days, Naomi had been chattering on about apartments, textbooks, and everything else related to medical school. In between the long, one-sided conversations, she occasionally took breaks to remind him that he shouldn’t be lifting heavy things, or exerting himself at all. Any time he wanted to go outside, she hurried him back indoors and plunked another book in his hand, or else long, boring medical essays she printed off the computer. Whenever he wanted to do something more strenuous than shower or walk from his room to the kitchen, she hovered over him, reminding him that he was still weak and needed to sit and exercise his mind, needed to concentrate on school, needed to not let what had happened stop him from becoming a doctor.

Anna had gone back home for work, giving Gabe a few more days to help create distance between mother and son. But try as he might, Gabriel couldn’t budge Naomi. She was as stubborn as the rest of them, completely convinced that she knew best, and Castiel had to admit that those qualities were probably what made her such an excellent lawyer. When she truly wanted something, Naomi Novak dug her teeth into it like a dog with a bone and refused to let go.

But now it was too much for Castiel. What he wanted, more than anything, was for his mother to _shut up_ and leave him be.

“Mom, I _don’t care,”_ he snapped. Angry at being interrupted, Naomi narrowed her eyes at him.

“Watch your tone, Castiel. I’m trying to _help you,”_ she snapped. “You can’t let what happened set you off track. The only way to get things done on time is to throw yourself back into them.”

Grumbling, Castiel ignored her and looked out the window. There was a group of children playing in the street, two girls swinging a jump rope while another girl and a boy jumped in and out of it, laughing with delight and chanting rhymes.

He had never skipped rope before. He’d been a studious child, and sickly besides, so had spent much of his childhood cooped up with books.

“I’m going outside,” he declared, cutting off his mother as she continued to chatter on about courses.

“Castiel, you stay here! We have a lot to go over and--”

Standing up, Castiel ignored her and walked outside. The children stopped their game and turned to look at him with wide eyes. He briefly debated asking if he could join in, but dismissed the notion almost immediately. He was too old to engage in such games, and the children would likely think him strange besides.

Instead, he turned and continued walking down the street. Thankfully, there were no reporters out. His fifteen minutes of fame, such as they were, were over. The world had moved on from his tragic tale, leaving him behind.

Smiling, Castiel found himself humming as he walked. But, of course, even the songs he absently knew had a touch of the medical to them. The song was inaccurate, of course, but one of the first he had learned as a child, and he could remember his mother laughing with delight as he sung it.

_The foot bone connected to the…heel bone! The heel bone connected to the…ankle bone! The ankle bone connected to the…leg bone! Now hear the word of the Lord! Now hear the word of the Lord!_

He didn’t know if the lyrics were even correct. He had spent so much of his life learning the proper names of the bones of the human body that the song, anatomically incorrect as it was, had faded from his mind.

It was pleasantly warm out, so even in his thin t-shirt and old jeans, he felt more than comfortable. He hadn’t had a plan when he left the house, hadn’t really thought about anything other than getting away from his mother for a few minutes. He had no wallet with him, no phone, and no keys.

For once, he decided not to worry. Instead, Castiel continued walking without worrying about where he was going. He kept a steady pace, careful not to overexert himself. He began to hum quietly, not thinking of any particular song, and found himself walking out of his neighborhood, past the old buildings on the avenue that advertised soda and milkshakes and haircuts, past the small police station and firehouse. He walked until all of those things were behind him, walked past the post office and the high school and eventually even the other houses that surrounded them. He walked until there was nothing on either side of him except for flat, open fields dotted here and there with trees and the occasional horse or cow or pig.

He kept walking past the small family properties that used to be farms, back in the days of his great grandparents and great-great grandparents. A few trucks and cars drove by, but no one gave him a second look. It wasn’t unusual to see someone walking alone, enjoying a quiet stroll or simply looking for something to do. There wasn’t exactly a lot to keep you entertained where he lived, and he knew a lot of people who had simply gone walking around on the weekends when he was in high school, collecting their buddies to go hang out in the woods or cause general mischief.

Almost absently, he wondered if his mother would send Gabriel or his father out after him, or if one of them had cooled her off enough by now to accept the fact that he just needed some time alone, instead of being hovered over by a family member every minute of the day since he returned from the hospital. The longer he walked with no sign of his family’s car, the easier he felt. Strangely, he did not feel guilty for storming out of the house and leaving Naomi behind. Instead, he felt oddly peaceful, from a combination of the quiet, the clean air, and the exercise.

Finally, he found himself stopping in front of an open driveway. There was a low fence on either side of the gravel, clearly meant to be a land divide, as it was too low and flimsy to keep an animal behind it. Staring down the graveled path, he spotted an old looking house, clearly in need of a fresh paint job. When he turned, he saw a sign hanging from a post in the ground, clearly freshly painted.

_Masters’ Family Funeral Home  
Family owned and serving the community since 1876_

Taking a deep breath to calm his suddenly racing heart, Castiel stared at the sign. His brain must have led his feet there subconsciously.

He remembered Gabriel telling him that his apparent resurrection had scared the girl who worked there, and suddenly he felt very guilty for that. Without deciding to, he moved forward down the driveway, keeping well off the gravel path in case someone drove down it. It wouldn’t do to be hit by a car and die for real, after all.

Although, he supposed, whoever hit him could simply toss his body in the backset and drive it up the rest of the way to the funeral home.

Strangely, he felt a quiet sense of peace settle over him as he walked. It was different than the calm he had experienced out on the road, although he couldn’t explain how. It was more like the feeling of coming home after an exceptionally long and difficult day.

And, he had to admit, the land around the house was clearly peaceful. It wasn’t as well taken care of as it had been the last time Castiel had been here for a funeral, but it was still a peaceful place. The grass was freshly mowed, and still green, and the few trees that dotted the property were all well taken care of. The house was in need of a good painting, but aside from that, it looked perfectly normal. There were no stickers or decorations in the clean windows or on the porch. Instead, there was a simple swing off near the corner, and, by the door, an urn filled with sand that was clearly meant for cigarette butts. When he climbed the stairs, he noticed that they were sturdy, and clearly newer than the rest of the house. The door was in need of new paint as badly as the rest of the house.

Hesitating for a moment, Castiel opened the screen door and raised his fist to knock. He hadn’t seen any cars in the front of the property, so he wasn’t even sure if they were home. And even if they were, would they even welcome him? He’d nearly scared the daughter to death, and had probably caused a bunch of trouble for the small, family run business. He hoped they weren’t mad at him.

Before he could make a choice to knock or not, the door swung open, and Castiel found himself staring up in the strange, yellow eyes of Azazel Masters. He had seen the man a handful of times in his life, either picking his daughter up from cheerleading practice or at the few funerals Castiel had attended. He was thinner than Castiel remembered him, and leaning heavily on a cane, but his gaze was still strong.

“It’s the dead boy,” Azazel said when Castiel kept staring at him. “How can I help you?”

Castiel blinked at the casual way that Azazel addressed his death and resurrection. Everyone but Gabriel had tip toed around it in his family, simply referring to it as his “accident” if they referred to it at all.

“I…um…I just…” Castiel stammered. He wasn’t even sure what he was doing there. He tried to say that he just wanted to apologize for scaring the man and his daughter, and for causing them trouble, but the words refused to come out.

“Why don’t you come inside?” Azazel suggested. “No use standing out on the porch, not in this heat. And take your shoes off, please. You looked like you walked here, and Meg would kill you again if you tracked dust all over the house when she’s just vacuumed. Guests take their shoes off, here.”

Azazel simply turned and went back into the house without looking to see if Castiel would follow him. Taking another deep breath, Castiel did, kicking off his shoes and neatly depositing them in a basket by the door that was filled with sneakers, boots, and sandals. He even turned and gently closed the door behind him, then looked around to try to find where his host had gotten to.

The front room of the funeral home was just as he remembered it. The floor was covered in a soft blue carpet that branched out, leading to the two viewing rooms on either side of the foyer. One was larger than the other, and held a piano. Both of them were unused at the moment, the chairs pulled to the side and the piano covered with a sheet. In front of him, he could see a small door the presumably led to the rest of the house. Off the smaller viewing room was an even smaller office, presumably where Azazel did most of his paperwork.

As if his thoughts conjured the man, Azazel poked his head out from behind a door. “Why don’t you come back into the house proper? The furniture isn’t out in the viewing rooms, anyway, and they’re not the best place to talk.”

Not seeing a choice, Castiel followed him. The door opened up into a short hallway that eventually branched off into a living room, kitchen, and another small room that might’ve once been a bedroom, but was now being used for extra storage. When he looked to his left, he saw a narrow set of stairs going up. Next to them was another door that was firmly shut, with a small Employees Only! sign hanging off of it.

“It’s small, but it’s home,” Azazel said, interrupting Castiel’s thoughts. “We keep our small selection of caskets in another building on the property. There’s a catalogue, too, you can order out of. I wish we had the room for it in here, but we simply don’t. Would you like some tea, or a soda?”

Castiel simply blinked rapidly at the man, trying to process all the information he had gotten, and trying to figure out how he could so quickly and casually go from discussing caskets to offering Castiel something to drink.

“Some water would be fine,” he finally said. Azazel nodded and moved toward the kitchen, motioning for Castiel to follow. He did, sitting himself in a chair when Azazel gestured to it and watched the man bustle around the kitchen, getting water from a filtered jug in the fridge for Castiel and pouring a glass of iced tea for himself. Finally, the man sat down across from him.

“So, I suppose you have some questions,” Azazel said. “I’ve read that near-deathers often return to the site of their experience, in order to gain clarity, I suppose, or because they’re searching for meaning. I, myself, have never had a near death experience, so I can’t relate.”

“Actually, I wanted to, uh, apologize,” Castiel said quietly. “My brother told me that I gave you and your daughter quite a fright when I woke up.”

Azazel smiled then, although to Castiel, it looked more like a wild animal bearing its teeth. “That you did, son. Never heard her scream like that, ever. Girl grew up around dead bodies, and they make all sorts of sounds, you know. She was never afraid of ‘em. But she looked like she’d seen a ghost when I went in there after I heard her scream.” Azazel took a sip of his iced tea. “Once in a lifetime experience, that. Once you put someone on that table, they usually stay still.” Azazel laughed a little at that, and Castiel found himself smiling with the man. Feeling more relaxed, he took a sip of his water.

“No harm done, though,” Azazel continued. “Mostly, she was just afraid she was going to kill you again, I think.”

“Still, I’m sorry if I caused any problems,” Castiel said.

Azazel waved his hand. “No, no troubles. It’ll be a fun story to tell come Christmastime, I think. And you’ll have quite the tale as well. How are you feeling, after your miraculous recovery? Your heart?”

“I’m healing,” Castiel answered. “My doctor says that I’ll have to be careful with my stress levels and my activity, but I’m doing better.”

“That’s good to hear. I was worried about you after they took you to the hospital,” Azazel told him. To Castiel’s surprise, the man sounded entirely genuine. “You’re young, with your whole life ahead of you. It would’ve been a shame to put you in the ground.”

Before the conversation could continue, Castiel heard the creak of a door opening. Turning toward the door at the back of the kitchen, he watched as a young, dark haired woman stumbled into the kitchen. She was barefoot, and her feet were covered in dust. Her hair was pulled back away from her face and off her neck, and there were heavy, dirty covered gloves on her hands, as if she’d been gardening.

“Hey, dad, have you seen my…” she started to speak, trailing off when she saw Castiel sitting at the table. “What’s he doing here?”

Castiel swallowed hard as he looked at her. He’d seen Meg Masters, of course, since they had lived in the same town their whole lives and had gone to High School together. But she’d been a couple of years ahead of him, and he’d never gotten a good look at her up close.

But he remembered her eyes. They were narrowed in suspicion instead of wide with surprise and fright, but her bright, hazel eyes were the only thing he remembered after he’d woken up.

“He came for a visit,” Azazel told her. “Sit. You want some iced tea?”

“I’m sorry,” Castiel blurted before Meg could answer her father. “For scaring you, I mean. Gabriel said I scared you, when I woke up, and I’m sorry that I scared you.” 

Meg shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m just glad I didn’t re-kill you.”

“Oh, okay,” he said quickly. Azazel looked between the two of them and shook his head.

“Anyway, Castiel, it’s getting quite late. Would you like to stay for dinner?” Azazel asked.

Castiel glanced at the clock sitting on the wall and felt queasy. It _was_ late, nearly six o’clock, which meant he had been gone for hours. His mother would be angry when he got home, after she finished being worried sick.

“Actually, I have to go. I…didn’t tell my mother I was leaving. She’ll be worried, and probably a bit angry.”

“I didn’t see a bike. Did you walk here?” Azazel asked. He whistled when Castiel nodded. “Damn, that’s a long walk. Meg, why don’t you drive the boy home?”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Castiel insisted. “I walked here, I can walk back.”

“Nonsense,” Azazel argued. “It’ll be dark soon, and you shouldn’t be walking down the road after dark. You don’t wanna get hit by a car.”

“It’s no trouble,” Meg told him. But her tone was flat instead of friendly. She stripped off her gloves and plucked a car key off a hook hanging by the back door. “C’mon. Grab your shoes.”

Castiel did, thanking Azazel for his hospitality before going out the back door.

“Well, sure. Come back anytime,” he said. “Good luck with your mother.”

Castiel merely nodded and followed Meg around the side of the house, where a small van was parked next to a gleaming black hearse. He glanced nervously at the hearse as Meg rolled her eyes.

“Oh, get in. It’s actually pretty comfy. Tom and I slept in the back a few times when we were kids and we wanted to try camping in the yard,” Meg told him. “But you can ride in the front. Generally only dead people get to hang out in the back.”

Castiel slid into the passenger seat. Surprisingly, it was pretty comfortable, although the car did smell like flowers.

They drove mostly in silence, with Meg staring straight ahead. She didn’t even put on the radio.

Finally, she spoke. “It’s no big deal, you know. You didn’t scare me that bad. But there’s no way you walked all the way out here just to apologize.”

“I don’t know. I just started walking and I wound up there.”

“Searching for answers? The doctor would have them, probably. Just a medical problem.”

Castiel shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t know. But thank you, for driving me home. Could you stop up the street? I’m not sure my mother will be happy if she knows I went back there.”

Meg nodded. “Yeah, sure. I can see that. Not too many people really wanna hang out willingly in a funeral home.”

She stopped up the street from his house, the hearse idling. Castiel thanked her again as he got out, and Meg waved at him before leaving.

He stood on the corner for a while, watching her drive away, and turned to go and face his mother.

.

Naomi had been more than angry. She had been absolutely furious, screaming and giving him the worst scolding he’d ever gotten in his life. She’d been worried sick about him, she said, and had been driving around searching for him. Still, for some reason, he refused to tell her where he’d gone, simply retiring to his room when his mother shouted at him to go and think about what he’d done, as if he was a child.

Naomi continued to yell after that, and it was the first time he’d heard his parents fight in a long, long time. Chuck, normally quiet, shouted just as loud as his wife.

Finally, Gabriel crept into Castiel’s room after the house had gone quiet.

“Dude, you done fucked up,” Gabriel said. Absurdly, Castiel began to laugh.

“I know,” Castiel groaned, hiding his face in his hands. “I’m a grown man, Gabriel. A college graduate. I should be able to go for a walk if I want to.”

 “She’s just worried about your heart,” Gabriel soothed.

Castiel sighed. “I know. I do feel bad about worrying her.”

“Where did you go, anyway? We drove around town for hours and we couldn’t find you. Mom was about to call the cops, thinking you were dead in a ditch somewhere.”

“I just walked. I didn’t really think about going anywhere,” Castiel said. “I just needed to get away.”

“Well, where did you wind up?” Gabriel pressed.

“The funeral home,” Castiel mumbled.

“Ah. Well, that makes sense,” Gabriel told him. “People who have near-death experiences are often drawn back to the sites where it occurred. Seeking closure, I think, or just wondering why they made it.”

Castiel snorted. “Mr. Masters said almost the same thing.”

“Did you get the closure you needed, then?”

“I don’t know. At least, I don’t think so,” Castiel said slowly. “I wanted to apologize to Meg for, you know, scaring her. And her father and I just sort of sat in the kitchen and talked a little bit. But it felt…nice. Aside from you, everyone’s kind of tiptoeing around the fact that I died for a minute there, legally at least. But when he opened the door he just said ‘it’s the dead boy’ and invited me inside.”

Gabriel’s phone buzzed. Castiel watched his brother read the message he’d gotten, a smile spreading over his face.

“It’s Meg,” Gabriel informed him. “She asked if Naomi yelled at you, and she explained that she drove you back home. She also asked one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“She asked if you wanted to see the table where you woke up. For closure.”

“Is that even legal?” Castiel asked.

Gabriel’s eyes sparkled with mischief. “Probably not. Wanna go?”

“I don’t think our mother would like it.”

“I didn’t ask if you thought our mother would like it. I asked if you wanted to go.”

Suddenly, Castiel really, really did.

“Yes.”

“Alright. We’ll go first thing tomorrow morning. Mom should’ve cooled down by then.”

“Do you think she’ll let me out?”

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “You’re a grown man, Castiel. It really isn’t up to her.”

.

Naomi was still angry the next morning. She didn’t speak to Castiel over breakfast, and merely glared when Gabriel told her that the two of them were going out together. Chuck, however, told them to have fun before he locked himself in his home office to work on his next novel. He and Gabriel drove to the Masters’ home without speaking, the radio warbling in the background, and, absurdly, Castiel found himself fidgeting in the passenger seat.

“You don’t have to be nervous,” Gabriel said as they pulled onto the gravel driveway. “It’s not like they’re secretly vampires or serial killers.”

“Didn’t Meg have an ancestor that was a serial killer?” Castiel pointed out. He was sure that Gabriel had told him about it back when they’d done family trees in High School. A few students had discovered that they were related to various people that had had some notoriety in the history of the town. Meg, and another girl who was a very distant cousin, had discovered that they were both related to the only serial killer the town had ever produced.

“Yeah, but he wasn’t in the funeral business. He owned a bar, I think,” Gabriel countered. “You’ll be fine. You don’t even have to get on the table. Maybe just being in there will give you a sense of closure and you can figure stuff out.”

“Maybe,” Castiel agreed. They parked on the side of the house, next to the hearse, and walked around to the back. Meg was waiting on the steps that led to the kitchen door, a lit cigarette dangling from her fingers.

“Those things’ll kill ya,” Gabriel said as they approached. Meg rolled her eyes and blew a series of perfect smoke rings in his and Gabriel’s direction.

“Everything’ll kill ya if you give it enough time,” she drawled. Her dark hair was pulled back again, but today she was wearing a conservative suit. She was still barefoot, though, except for her stockings.

Castiel, clad in jeans and a t-shirt, felt underdressed in comparison.

“Is this a bad time? Did you get a body in last night?”

Meg shook her head. “No body. Someone from the next town over wanted to talk to dad about arranging a memorial service. The guy’s getting shipped in, like you were, only he’s not getting back up.”

“You sure about that?” Gabriel teased.

“Well, if he sits up with half a head, I’ll call you and let you know that the zombie apocalypse has started,” Meg said dryly. Taking a final puff of her cigarette, she stubbed it out in a small ashtray that was sitting on the steps. “Come on inside.”

“Thank you for letting me do this,” Castiel said as they walked into the kitchen. Meg shrugged.

“Sometimes you have to,” was all she said. She led Castiel and Gabriel through the kitchen, stopping at the closed door next to the stairs. “Gabe, mind waiting in the kitchen?”

Gabriel nodded. “Sure thing.”

Meg simply pulled a key from a chain around her neck and used it to unlock the door. Pulling it open, she gestured for Castiel to go ahead of her. He hesitated for a moment, then stepped down into the darkness.

The staircase was short, and the room at the bottom of it was bitter cold. His teeth began to chatter almost immediately, and he nearly jumped when he felt a warm breath on the back of his neck.

“Lemme get the lights,” Meg said. A moment later the room lit up, and Castiel found himself blinking rapidly as his eyes adjusted.

The room was a good size, and cold. There were two large metal tables in the middle of it, surrounded by what he could only assume was embalming equipment. It also held quite a large sink, and a cabinet full of bottles and jugs. There was protective gear hanging on the wall next to a cheery lavender sweater. Clipboards hung neatly from hooks on another wall. Large vents near the ceiling sent air flowing through the room, and there were drains evenly spaced out on the floor.

“It’s been redone a couple of times,” Meg explained. “I’m still not entirely sure if it’s actually up to proper code, so don’t tell anyone. The ventilation stuff is new, though. Tip top shape, and so’s the gear, so I probably won’t wind up with cancer, not like good old grandpa and great grandpa. Might be too late for dad. We’ll see, at this point. But this is where the magic happens, anyway.”

Castiel slowly turned in a circle, taking in the whole room. Everything was neatly placed, and it had a sterile feel to it. Aside from the humming of the air conditioner, it was perfectly quiet, and to him it seemed like it would be wrong to raise his voice, to disturb the perfect stillness. The smell of it vaguely reminded him of a hospital, but unlike a hospital, where the smell of sickness lurked under the smell of disinfectant, there was a different smell lurking here. Something primal, something somehow pleasant and unpleasant at the same time.

Death.

“Which one was my table?” Castiel asked. He kept his voice small and quiet, almost a whisper.

Meg pointed to the table on the right side of the room. “You can go ahead and climb up. I’ll disinfect it, afterward.”

Castiel did. The metal table was cold under him, nearly too cold for him to touch with his bare hands. He maneuvered himself onto his back and looked up at the ceiling, waiting for a sense of clarity to come to him.

“No, like this,” Meg said. She’d approached the table without him noticing, moving with quiet, practiced steps. Gently, she grabbed one of his wrists with her hands and moved his arm down to his side. He went limp, letting her manipulate his body, and felt his breath slow down as she did. She moved both his arms, opened his fingers _just so,_ gently pried his mouth open, and, finally, placed her fingertips on his eyes and gently closed them almost all the way.

They were silent for a few moments, Castiel’s breathing the only thing that he could hear, until he stopped that, too, holding his breath. He felt cold, colder than he’d ever felt, even colder than he’d felt in the hospital. The table under his back felt sturdy. Felt safe. He could feel his heart, too, beating out a slow, steady rhythm in his chest. The air conditioning hummed, producing a white noise that cleared his head of any thoughts.

He let out the breath he was holding, but didn’t open his eyes. Instead, he closed them all the way, blocking out all of the light. “Meg, can you tell me what you were going to do?”

“What do you mean?” she asked. Her voice was low and soft, as if speaking to a wounded animal.

“If I didn’t wake up, tell me what would’ve happened,” he requested.

“I would’ve taken some notes. Then, I would’ve gotten you out of the body bag, and then gotten you out of your clothes. Your parents asked if we could save the suit. I’d see if it needed to be washed, and would’ve set that aside. Then, I would’ve washed you. Made sure everything was clean,” she explained.

“And then?”

“Then I would’ve gone to bed,” Meg continued. “It was late, when you got in. I would’ve woken up bright and early. Shaved you, if your parents wanted you shaved, of course. Done some massaging. Then you have to set the facial features. We have eye caps, to make sure your eyes don’t look sunken in, and that helps keep them closed. Then some skin glue, for extra hold. Closed your mouth up. There’s a plastic thing for that, too, to give it shape. Then sewn in shut. Down through your jaw, up through your nose. There are needle injectors you can use instead, but dad doesn’t trust them.

“Then you get embalmed.” Meg paused and began lightly touching various points on his body, her fingertips ghosting over arteries and veins. “Arterial. Cavity. Blood pumped out while embalming fluid gets pumped in. There are a couple of incisions, to make sure it gets everywhere it needs to get. Then you get plugged up, to prevent leakage. At this point we’re done, mostly. Then I’d dress you. Make you up so you look a bit more like you’re just sleeping. Dad helps me with that part, mostly. I don’t have a perfect grasp on makeup for the dead yet. Then he and I would lug in the casket and get you in it, all nice and neat, and into the viewing room. Then you’re ready for your funeral.”

Castiel took a deep, shuddering breath and opened his eyes. He felt lighter, somehow, and better than he had in a long, long time. He sat up slowly, leaving plenty of room on the table.

“Can you tell me what happened that night?”

Meg shrugged and hopped up next to him on the table. “I came in to do some pre-work before bed, and I talked to you a bit. Then you just…popped up. You vomited, too.”

“Is that all that happened?” Castiel pressed. Meg narrowed her eyes at him.

“What do you remember?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Castiel lied. “I just…I suppose I thought it would be more dramatic.”

“I was dramatic enough for the both of us,” Meg assured him. “Screaming and flailing like a girl in a horror film when she meets the monster.” She cracked a smile then. “You feel better?”

“I do, actually,” Castiel told her. “I don’t know why, but I do. Thank you, by the way, for letting me do this.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Meg asked. She seemed genuinely surprised, as if what she had done was a perfectly normal thing. “Are you ready to move?”

Castiel wanted to say that he was. But then he thought of his mother, of her temper and her insistence on pushing him to go back to school, thought of her hovering and her overprotectiveness, and he wasn’t.

He didn’t want to move. He wanted peace and quiet. He wanted everything to stop for a minute. He wanted to rest.

But he knew he had to move, had to climb back off the table and throw himself back into life.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Meg nodded and slipped off the table next to him. He followed her from the room and stood behind her as she re-locked the door.

“You find what you were looking for?” Gabriel asked when they walked back into the kitchen.

“It was enlightening,” Castiel answered.

Azazel walked into the room before anyone could say anything else. He looked between Gabriel and Castiel, a frown on his face, and Castiel took a deep breath, nervous that he’d just gotten Meg in trouble.

“Sweetie, you didn’t offer our guests anything to eat or drink. That’s very rude,” Azazel said. Meg flashed him a quick smile.

“I haven’t had time to yet, Dad. Jesus,” she said. “You guys want a coke, or something?”

“We should be heading back, actually,” Gabriel said. Castiel felt his heart skip a beat at his brother’s words.

“But you just got here,” Azazel insisted. “Meg, Gabriel, why don’t you two catch up? Castiel, why don’t you and I go for a walk? I’d love to show you my petunias.”

“They wouldn’t have bloomed yet, dad,” Meg pointed out. “Besides, you haven’t planted in years.”

Azazel ignored her. “Come humor an old man, Castiel.”

“A walk would be nice,” Castiel said slowly. Azazel led him out the kitchen door, leaning heavily on his cane. Castiel followed, slipping his shoes back on.

“Meg is right when she says I’ve not planted for years. My wife had the green thumb, not me. She’s buried just over there,” Azazel rambled, using his cane to point down a well manicured path. “Family cemetery. Been there since the family bought this land. Back then, people took care of their own dead, you know.”

“I didn’t, actually,” Castiel said. He’d never really thought about what a mortician’s job entailed until his own brush with death. “I thought there were always morticians.”

“Well, sometimes there were. But for the most part, the family took care of the body. People were laid out at home, in their own living rooms. The family slept around them. A different kind of grieving, I think. The way funerals are nowadays can sometimes be so impersonal, but it depends on the family. People shy away from death. It scares them, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s natural. Others find comfort in the process as it is now. There’s really no wrong way to go about your death ritual. Well, almost, anyway. I wouldn’t recommend starting an all out family brawl,” Azazel said. “Oh, look. More buttons. I’ll have to have Meg rip them up. They spring up everywhere, you know. They’re hearty flowers.”

“I like them. They’re colorful,” Castiel said. “I used to like to garden, when I was little and my mother had more time for it. We’d do it together.”

“Hm. Maybe you should teach my Meg. She inherited my black thumb,” Azazel told him. “Lilith had quite the garden. Flowers. Some fruit and vegetables. I’m afraid the strawberries have taken most of it over, though. The mint leaves on the other side of the house are mounting an impressive attack, however. I suspect we will soon be drowning in mint. Good to chew on, though.”

They continued to walk, Azazel shuffling along with his cane. They avoided heading down the stone path that led to the graveyard. Azazel led Castiel toward a small building instead.

“Be a good lad and open that door for me, will you?” he requested when they reached it. Castiel did, gaping in surprise when Azazel turned on a light, revealing a decent sized showroom full of caskets.

“Oh, I’m not going to murder you. I am, however, going to ask you to help me tag one. The family picked it out online, if you can believe it. Meg and Tom pretty much set the whole web site up. I’m a bit hopeless with computers myself.” Reaching into the pocket of his suit, Azazel pulled out a piece of paper and a pad of sticky notes. “I’m afraid I’ve lost my glasses, so if you could find that number and put a sticky note on it, I’d appreciate it.”

Puzzled, Castiel did what he was told. Azazel stood in the doorway, merely watching. It was strangely fun, like a treasure hunt, and he was oddly disappointed that it was over when he found the correct casket and stuck the pad to it.

“Excellent. Shall we head back to the house?” Azazel said when it was done. Castiel nodded, but noticed that Azazel walked more slowly than before, forcing Castiel to keep pace with him.

“I can’t help but notice that you don’t seem too enthusiastic at the idea of going back home,” Azazel observed. “You looked a little scared when your brother suggested you leave.”

“I had a fight with my mother over what happened yesterday,” Castiel confessed. It was strange. There was something about being on the Masters property that made him want to open up, something about the family patriarch himself that made Castiel want to talk to him. “She’s been a bit…overbearing since I returned home. Well, she always has been, but it has gotten worse since the incident.”

“Yes, that’s what Meg and I have taken to calling it as well. The Incident,” Azazel said quietly. “Well, that’s settled then, I suppose.”

“What’s settled?” Castiel asked.

Azazel stopped walking and looked Castiel up and down. “I think you need some quiet, kid. You could stay here for a couple of days, if you want, until you get your head sorted out. Figure out where to go from here. And I could use an extra hand around here. Nothing too strenuous, of course, since you’re still healing. But there are a few things Meg and I can’t get done by our lonesome. We simply don’t have the time or hands. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’m not exactly up to rigorous activity, either. And you’d be surprised what some peaceful work can do to clear a head.”

“I don’t--thank you but--but my mother--she--” Castiel stammered.

“Don’t think about what your mother wants. Think about what you want,” Azazel advised. “Truly.”

“I just want some peace and quiet,” Castiel said. “Just for a day or two. Just a little.”

“Then you’ll have it,” Azazel promised. “Now come on in.”

.

“I still don’t think this is a good idea, just so you know,” Meg said as she led him up the stairs. The landing opened up into four small bedrooms, one of which had been converted into a sewing room, and a full bathroom. There was another door across from the entrance to one of the bedrooms that revealed another set of stairs when Meg opened it.

“I’m not so sure it is, either,” Castiel had told her. Gabriel, however, had thought that it was a fantastic idea. He’d set off right away and returned with a duffle bag filled with clothes, and had promised Castiel he would take care of their mother. For his part, Castiel had guiltily written her a short note, not telling her where he was, but instead insisting that he needed a few days to clear his head, and that he would be home soon.

“This is the only spare room we have right now. Well, Tom’s room is free, but dad seems to think he’ll show up any day now for a visit, so he doesn’t let anyone stay in it. Tom won’t, though. The next time he sets foot in this house will probably be dad’s funeral, if the idiot doesn’t get himself killed on that deathtrap of a motorcycle and wind up in a viewing room first,” Meg explained.  

She beckoned him up the stairs. Castiel followed, clutching the banister for support. Their bare feet made no sound against the wooden floors.

“You’re lucky. We just cleared it out up here. It gets damnably hot in the summer sometimes, but the air conditioner _should_ work,” Meg explained. “If not, the couch is pretty comfy. I’ve slept down there before when the AC wasn’t working. Dad’s got a toothbrush for you and there’s towels in the bathroom and toothpaste. We just put new sheets on the bed, too.”

Castiel nodded as he looked around the room. The attic was spacious, with a large window that overlooked the backyard. There was a small bed and chest of drawers next to it, and various boxes were scattered around the room. He walked over to the bed, set his duffle bag on the quilt, then leaned over to get a closer look at one of the pictures that was hanging on the wall.

“That’s my grandfather and grandmother,” Meg told him. “Luc and Abby Masters. Embalming fluid’s a carcinogen, so cancer got gramps. Hunting accident got grandma.”

“I’m sorry,” Castiel said automatically. Meg shrugged.

“They died when I was pretty young. The picture next to them is my great grandfather, my grandfather, and my dad when he was little.” Meg walked over to him and pointed at a black and white picture that showed two men and a little boy sitting on the porch of the funeral home, all three of them dressed in their Sunday best. “Dad loves that one.”

“Why are they all up here, though?” Castiel asked. “Surely they should be in the living room, if they’re family photographs.”

“Well, this  isn’t so much the guest room as its where you get banished when there’s a funeral going on, if you’re a kid,” Meg explained. “You have to really shout and stomp to be heard all the way downstairs, and people don’t wanna hear kids running and playing and being happy when they’re trying to grieve their loved ones. So whenever there was a funeral happening, Tom and I got chucked up here. It was the same with my dad.”

“That sounds rather depressing,” Castiel said.

“Oh, it could be. But we had toys and books and stuff up here. Tom got really into birdwatching, oddly enough.” Meg moved to look out the window. “I always liked that you could see the family cemetery from up here. When mom died, I used to sneak up here before I went to bed to look at it and say goodnight. It was comforting.”

Castiel stayed silent, not knowing what to say.

“Anyway, you can do whatever you want. If you’re still here when that guy with half a head comes in, you’re gonna have to hang out up here for the funeral, though,” Meg continued. “I have some cleaning to do.”

“Your dad mentioned some chores?” Castiel said quickly. Meg shrugged.

“Sure. There’s always stuff that has to be done. Just pick something out.”

She walked out the door, leaving Castiel alone in her family’s attic. He stared at the empty doorframe for a moment before he turned and looked back out the window. The family cemetery marred the land, the headstones standing up like mushrooms in the rain, but there was peace in it. The dead of the Masters family were safe at home, surrounded by family, on family land. It wasn’t as beautiful as other cemeteries he had been to; the ground was uneven, sunken in places and elevated in others, and the grass was patchy. He could see weeds growing up over several headstones, and moss growing on others. Still, it had its own kind of beauty.

When he looked straight down, he saw that the flowerbeds were choked with weeds.

Decision made, he set off downstairs, intent on asking Azazel where he might find a weeding claw.

.

Groaning, Castiel fell face first onto his temporary bed.

His skin was still wet from the shower, and still warm. He was tired, more tired than he could remember being since he woke up in the hospital. But his muscles ached pleasantly, and when Azazel had stepped outside and praised him on his progress cleaning up the flower beds, his chest had warmed pleasantly as well.

He had worked throughout the day, taking breaks when whenever he felt overwhelmed or simply too tired. Azazel had brought him lemonade a few times, and had insisted that Castiel sit in the shade with him and enjoy it. Meg had even joined them, once, and brought out sandwiches as well.

By the time Azazel had called Castiel in for dinner, the flowerbeds around the back and sides of the house had been cleared of weeds, buttons, and any dead or dying flowers. He’d watered, too, hoping to coax life out of any seeds that were hiding in the soil. In the back of his mind he knew that it was most likely a fruitless quest. Azazel had admitted that he had a black thumb, and that Meg was much the same. Still, it gave him peace, to be nurturing new life, if only for a short time.

Picking himself up, Castiel reached for the duffle bag this brother had brought him and dug through it, pulling out a pair of pajamas. He tugged the bright blue material onto his body, grateful for the warmth. The Masters house was quiet, almost too quiet. He was used to the hustle and bustle of college life, and before that, the almost constant noise of various siblings roaming throughout his home. But his temporary residence was silent as the grave. He expected that, over time, it would bother him. But for now, the quiet was welcome.

.

Over the next few days, Castiel continued his routine. Azazel or Meg made breakfast in the morning, usually something simple. Then, he would weed, or help Azazel with a few simple household chores. The man was determined to clear out the clutter in the storage room. Meg, for her part, worked on the funeral arrangements for the man with half a head.

He found her setting up the viewing room on his third day there, the one with the piano in it. He stood in the doorway and watched as she took the sheet off the piano, a sour look on her face.

“Do you not like playing?” he asked her.

“Not especially,” she answered. She had mostly avoided him the last few days, moving around the house as though he weren’t there. “I hate when they request live music. It’s always the same stuff. Hymns, mostly. But that’s good, I guess. I don’t know how to play much else. Unless they want The Itsy Bitsy Spider, of course.”

“I admit, I don’t know any piano. Or any other instrument,” Castiel told her.

Meg’s lips actually twitched with the ghost of a smile. “Consider yourself fortunate. Dad might want to see if you could play something.”

Castiel walked further into the room. “So you only know hymns and children’s songs?”

“And a few other things.” Sitting at the bench, Meg delicately touched the keys. The open chords of _Smoke on the Water_ floated through the room. “I can’t do anything complicated, though. My mom used to let me sit on her lap and sing silly songs, though.”

“Such as?”

She smiled again and began to play a slow, simple tune. _“Don’t you ever laugh as a hearse goes by, for you may be the next to die. They’ll wrap you up in a big white sheet, from your head down to your feet.”_

Castiel advanced into the viewing room and walked until he was standing near the piano. Meg paused momentarily and patted the bench before continuing.

 _“They’ll put you in a big, black box, and cover you up with dirt and rocks. All goes well for about a week, and then your coffin begins to leak. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout,”_ she continued. _“They eat your eyes, they eat your nose, they eat the jelly between your toes. Then a big, green worm, with rolling eyes, crawls in your stomach and out your eyes. Your stomach turns a slimy green, and pus pours out like whipping cream. You spread it on a slice of bread, and that’s what you eat, when you’re dead!”_

“A rather morbid song,” Castiel observed.

“Yes. Tom found it in a book of scary stories. Mom added music to it,” Meg told him. “She used to sing it to us, since we liked it so much. She’d tickle our feet and stomach, too, when the worms ate toes and burrowed in. But then again, Tom and I weren’t really bothered by death.”

“How is that going, by the way?”

“The embalming is all done. Finished this afternoon. Dad and I’ll move him in here later on, and the funeral is tomorrow. You’ll have to stay upstairs during, of course. No working in the garden while the guests are here. Dad or I will bring you up some a sandwich later in the afternoon.”

“I appreciate it,” Castiel said.

Meg smiled then. “There’s something else. Dad has a surprise for you.”

“For me?”

“Yeah, come on.”

Castiel followed her out the viewing room and into the kitchen. Azazel sat at the table with a newspaper and a glass of iced tea in front of him.

“Ah, Castiel. Sit, sit. I have something I think you’ll be very interested in,” the man said. Castiel watched as he bustled about the kitchen for a moment, opening drawers before returning to his seat. “I found these when I was poking around in the shed out back, and I thought you’d like to see them.”

Castiel glanced at the seed packets that Azazel pushed across the table. Cheery pictures of pumpkins, peonies, violets, green beans, sunflowers, tomatoes, and dahlias decorated the fronts. He touched each packet delicately, running his fingers over them and feeling the small bumps of the seeds insides.

“It’s probably too late for some of them, but I’m sure you’ll know which ones are good for planting,” Azazel explained. “I thought you might like to put some life back into the soil, now that you’ve cleaned it up. I can’t promise that things will stay alive, but we can do our best to make sure they do.”

Castiel swallowed hard. “Thank you.”

Azazel nodded. “Of course, we’ll have to ask you to make yourself scarce tomorrow. But the afternoon after that you’ll be able to start. You can pick where to plant them. Now, how about some lunch?”

.

That night, after the mourners had left, Castiel silently crept down the stairs. Meg had brought him a sandwich and a coke late in the afternoon, so he wasn’t hungry. But he was restless, after having been trapped in the same room all day. He missed the land, missed digging his fingers into the soil and feeling the rich, moist earth. There was nothing more to do in the garden, but he could water, getting it ready for planting tomorrow.

He walked out the back door and saw Meg sitting on the steps, a cigarette dangling from her fingers. She was still in her conservative suit from the funeral, but she’d taken her hair down, letting it flow around her shoulders. She stared in the direction of the family cemetery, so deep in thought that she didn’t turn to look at him.

“Are you alright?” he asked. Meg jumped a little and dropped her cigarette. Laughing dryly, she picked it up and took a drag.

“Yeah, just a long day. Plus, live music,” she said. “Tomorrow there’s some early stuff, some prayers, and then off to the cemetery. You’ll be here by yourself for a bit. But you can start planting right after everybody leaves. Dad might ask you to help clean up the viewing room, though.”

“I can vacuum and such while you two are gone,” he offered. Meg shook her head.

“Nah. He might just want help putting chairs away. Anyway, what’s up?”

“I just wanted some air and to see the garden. I can leave you alone, if you like.”

“Nah, you can sit.”

Castiel did, basking in the stillness of the twilight. The Masters land was quiet, as it always was, and peaceful. He and Meg sat in silence for a few minutes as she smoked. His brain itself was quiet, with no thoughts buzzing in his head.

Castiel took a deep breath. “I just realized…I haven’t thought about medical school since I came here.”

Meg looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “No?”

He shook his head. The porch light came on. “No. I haven’t…I’ve been concentrating on the garden, and on the things going on here…I haven’t even thought about how angry my mother will be when I return home. This is…this is the only time I haven’t thought about medical school. Ever.”

“Did you always want to be a doctor?” Meg asked him.

“That’s the only thing I remember working toward. I had a couple of other hobbies, as a child. I built models and I helped in the garden, of course. But it was always understood that I would be going to medical school,” he said. “I’ve never really thought about being anything else.”

Meg shrugged. “Maybe you just needed a break, then, after the whole thing.”

Castiel swallowed. “Can I ask you something?”

Meg put out her cigarette. “Sure.”

“Why did you do it?” Castiel asked. “I mean, I know that funeral homes are family things, but why did you stay when your brother left? What made you decide that it was right for you? Did you always know?”

“I always knew,” Meg said. She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. She didn’t turn to look at him, but instead stared straight ahead. Despite that, she didn’t seem to be looking at the sparse ground around them. Instead, she seemed to be staring beyond them, her eyes focused on some distant memory. “Ever since I was little.”

“How?” he pressed. Meg rested her chin on her knees and tightened her arms around her legs.

“When I was eight years old, I died,” she said quietly. “Do you remember my cousin, Ruby?”

Castiel shook his head.

“She was three or four years ahead of me in school, so it isn’t surprising that you don’t. Anyway,” Meg continued, “her family has a little house up by the lake. Dad sent me there one summer with Tom. Wanted us out of his hair for a bit. Ruby and Tom were supposed to be watching me when we went out to play. But they weren’t the most attentive. The rocks were wet, and I was a pretty uncoordinated kid. I slipped. My head hit a rock. I went under.”

Meg took a deep breath. “I drowned. Tom found me in time, and managed to pull me out. Aunt Cecily called an ambulance and did CPR. When I woke up, I knew that something had happened to me, but I wasn’t sure what. I don’t remember everything. I was too young, I think. I didn’t even know I’d died until later, when I overheard my parents talking about it. According to official records, I had been legally dead for around five minutes that day.

“After that, I wanted to know everything about the human body. I wanted to know what made our hearts beat and kept our blood inside us. I wanted to know how it worked. And I wanted to know what happened when it didn’t anymore. What happened after it stopped working. I used to sneak down into my dad’s office and read his textbooks from college by flashlight. There was a lot I didn’t understand, of course, and mom freaked out when she caught me. But the doctors told my parents that it was alright. I was just trying to understand, and that it might help me.

“Growing up in this house, our parents did they best they could to shield us from things, but…when you go to sleep at night, knowing there’s a dead body in the front parlor, death stops being scary. It’s commonplace. But seeing me like that, I think it really fucked Tom up. There’s a difference between the dead body of a stranger or acquaintance all dressed up to look their best and seeing your sister dead because you let her out of your sight. I think that’s why he got the Hell out of here when he turned eighteen and never came back.”

“I’m sorry,” Castiel said. “I…that’s a terrible thing.”

“Well, you would know,” Meg said. Her voice was casual, but she still did not turn to look at him. “Tell me, Castiel, what do you remember about being dead?”

“Not much,” he admitted.

“Not much or nothing at all?” Meg asked. “I’ll tell you what I remember. Almost nothing. I remember pain, horrible pain, from the rock hitting my head. The next thing I remember was feeling warm, really warm, and safe. Comfortable. Then the pain came back. My head was throbbing, and my chest hurt, and the lights in the hospital were so bright I couldn’t open my eyes. There wasn’t anything. There’s nothing but a big, blank space.”

Castiel swallowed and looked away from her, focusing his eyes on the few trees that dotted the fields around her family’s home. In truth, he had no memory of the time between his collapse on stage and waking up in the basement of her family’s funeral home. Even that memory was small, distant and fragmented. One minute he had been on stage, accepting his diploma, and the next he had been staring up into what he was sure were Meg’s warm, hazel eyes, the rest of the room around her a foggy gray mist. After that, it had been the hospital, with the worried faces of doctors and his parents and the too bright lights.

“There was nothing,” Castiel finally said. “A big blank. Like when you fall asleep and can’t remember what you dreamed.”

“Yeah, just like that,” Meg confirmed.

“But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything afterward. Maybe we just weren’t gone long enough,” Castiel argued. “Or maybe God knew we would be going back.”

“I’m not saying that doesn’t mean there’s no God or no afterlife, or whatever,” Meg pointed out. “Only that it isn’t certain that there is one, and that you can’t know. I’m not a philosopher, Cas. I’m a mortician. I know what happens to the human body after death, not the human consciousness.”

“Do you believe in a soul?”

Meg shrugged. “Honestly? I don’t know. Some days yes, some days no. So that’s a maybe, I guess.” She finally turned to look at him, and he found himself turning to look at her, too, staring directly into her eyes. “I don’t think we’re meant to know.”

“And you’re okay with that? Not knowing?”

“You spend enough time around dead people, you don’t care. You wonder, of course, sometimes late at night, or when you’re working on a body and everything’s quiet. But in the end, all that’s left of us is just that. A body. A shell. Your personality, who you were, it isn’t there anymore. It’s with the people you left behind, their stories and their memories. That’s a kind of afterlife, I guess. Maybe your consciousness goes somewhere else. Maybe it stops completely, like when you sleep. I don’t know. And I don’t care. You spend enough time with the dead, and you realize that the most important thing is living. Really _living._ Not just existing.”

“Everybody’s living. That’s part of being alive.”

Meg sighed again. “That’s not true and you know it. But I don’t have all the answers, Cas, not unless you want to know about the human decomposition process. Then I’m your girl.”  Uncurling from her ball, Meg stretched her feet out in front of her and then carefully picked herself up. “But I’m not here to debate God or the afterlife or whatever. You asked how I knew I wanted to be a mortician. That’s your answer.”

“I do…I remember one other thing,” he said quietly. “You.”

Meg stiffened. “What…what do you remember about me?”

“Your eyes. I think you were leaning over me. I remember your eyes. Everything else was a gray mist, but…I remember your eyes,” he admitted. Meg relaxed then.

“Well, I was getting ready to do prep work. You’re lucky someone was in the room with you, otherwise you might’ve died again,” she said. Meg yawned and brushed some dirt from the skirt of her suit. “I’m gonna head in and shower. Another long day tomorrow.”

“I think I’ll spend a few more minutes out here,” Castiel told her. Meg nodded and headed inside. Castiel watched her go.

Meg had always known she’d wanted to go into the family business, and had always had a job waiting for her, a job that would be secure. People always died. But people always got sick, too, and were always going to be in need of doctors. He had thought that was what he wanted, had worked toward it his whole life, and yet the thought of going to medical school filled him with dread. It wasn’t just dealing with blood or bodily fluids. He could handle that easily enough. The stress, the fact that you held someone’s life in your hands, was enough to set his heart pounding and make his palms sweat.

He wondered what his mother would say if he told her that he didn’t want to go. He could almost picture the disappointment in her face, and the anger. Could almost hear her saying how much potential that he had, that he was squandering his talent, that he didn’t know how to do anything else.

That part, at least, was true. He had few talents, and no marketable skills. He was awkward around most other people. He was so sure that this was what he was meant to do that there was no fallback plan, nothing to replace it. That, coupled with the money his parents had spent on his education…Castiel knew that he would feel guilty for the rest of his life if he told his mother that.

Then he thought of Hael’s letter, and of her advice to him to think about what he really wanted to do, and that he was always welcome at the farm.

The Masters house was quiet, and peaceful, and despite the thoughts in his head, he still felt the same calmness in his chest that he had felt the first time he set foot on the property while fully awake and aware. There was a sense of belonging in the land, a sense of home, and he didn’t want to leave its warm embrace. He knew that he would have to, though. Eventually his mother would come looking for him, or he would overstay his welcome, and he would have to go. When that time came, when he was thrust back into the real world, he would have to decide what to do.

And he still wasn’t sure he was ready to make a decision.

.

Meg returned home as he was out in the garden planting. Focused completely on the seeds, he ignored her as she knelt beside him on the grass, no doubt staining her stockings.

“Wanna stop a minute and come with me?” she asked. He turned to look at her and saw that she was holding a bundle of bright, cheery flowers.

“Where are you going?”

“To see my mother. I thought you’d like to see the family place, too.”

Castiel stood and dusted off his pants. “Alright.”

The family cemetery was so old that the names had mostly been worn away on the oldest stones. Some of them were cracked, some had pieces missing, and others were covered in vines or moss. Meg patted a few as she went past them, but largely ignored them. The newer graves shone, as if freshly washed, and he watched Meg move some old, withered flowers aside and lay down the new ones.

“This is my mother’s,” she said quietly. Castiel crossed himself. “We’ve buried people here since my family were farmers. Dad goes next to her. There’s a space for me just behind her.” She pointed to an empty plot of land. “She made her own coffin, you know. Dad made his, too. I think I’d like to make mine, but I’m not so good at carpentry.”

“It is peaceful here. Thank you for taking me,” Castiel told her. Meg took a deep breath and turned to face him.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she said. “We saw your mother when we stopped for donuts on the way home. She asked if dad knew where you were.”

Castiel felt his mouth go dry. “What…what did…”

“Dad, truthfully, told her that you weren’t in the house. He doesn’t like to lie,” Meg said. “I don’t wanna kick you out, and dad doesn’t either, but just be aware she’s looking for you.”

Castiel nodded. His palms began to sweat, and he felt his heart pound in his chest.

Meg reached out and took his hand. Her grip was warm and firm. “You can stay as long as you like.”

He squeezed her hand in return, the feeling of another person’s flesh grounding him. Without thinking about it, he stepped forward and bent his head to kiss her lightly. He felt Meg’s hand tighten in his, felt her body stiffen in surprise before she relaxed and kissed him back.

Realizing what he’d done, Castiel pulled away from her, dropping her hand and taking a step backward for good measure. “I’m sorry, I just--I don’t know what--I’m sorry.”

Meg blinked at him. “It’s alright.”

“No, it’s not. I shouldn’t have--you’ve been so kind, you and your father, and I--I should’ve asked, or I should’ve--” he stammered. Meg held her hand up to silence him.

“I kissed you when you were dead,” she said quietly. “That’s why you remember me leaning over you. I kissed you on the forehead. Then you woke up.”

Castiel felt his mouth drop open. “You what?”

“I kissed you,” she repeated. “You were lying there like sleeping beauty, peaceful and quiet and not as cold or stiff as you should’ve been, which should have been my first clue you weren’t really dead, not all the way. And I just...I just did it. I didn’t think about it. It just happened. Like this.”

It was his turn to blink at her. “Oh.”

“So, fair’s fair. At least we were both awake this time.” Meg shrugged then licked her lips. “You’re not a bad kisser, though.”

“Thank you,” Castiel said automatically. Meg tilted her head at him and narrowed her eyes.

“Come here,” she requested. She stepped toward him when he hesitated and gently took both of his hands in hers. Stretching up onto her toes, she kissed him again, slow and soft. He held her hands for another moment before he gave in and slipped his arms around her waist, pulling her closer.

He’d kissed maybe a handful of women in his lifetime, having been too busy with his studies for a relationship. But those kisses had been clumsy, drunken experiments in dark dorm rooms or the corners of parties. Here, sober and in the sunlight, it felt entirely different, spreading a warm feeling of pleasure thought his body as they simply held each other.

Finally, Meg pulled away from him and smiled. “We should probably not be doing this in front of my mother’s final resting place.”

Castiel laughed. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Let’s head back then,” Meg suggested. She held out her hand for him to take, wiggling her fingers. Castiel slipped his hands into hers gratefully, and allowed Meg to lead him back to the house.

Azazel emerged from the back door as they reached it. He smiled when he saw them, but Castiel noticed that, for once, his smile didn’t reach his eyes. Castiel tried to pull away from Meg, but she kept her grip on his hand.

“I assume Meg told you about your mother?” Azazel asked.

Castiel nodded. “Yes.”

“Do you know what you’re going to do about it?”

Castiel looked at the flowerbeds, and suddenly he did.

“Yes,” he said. “May I borrow your phone? I need to call my brother.”

.

“So, you’re going, then?” Meg asked the next morning. She was still dressed in her pajamas, despite the fact that it was late in the afternoon. There was nothing going on that day, no chores or work that needed to be done. Castiel, dressed in an old pair of overalls Azazel had dug up and one of the man’s old paint-splattered shirts, shrugged in response as he finished planting.

“I think it will be best,” he told her. “I still…I’m still not sure if I want to go to medical school, and I can’t stay here and think about it forever. You and your father have been most welcoming, but…”

“It’s still too close to your mother,” Meg offered.

Castiel shook his head. “Not just that. There’s also--it’s almost like--”

“You found what you were searching for here,” Meg said quietly. “Your closure. I get it. The year after my accident, I went back to the lake house. Dad didn’t want me to, but I needed to go. To see it and just…be there a while. I felt different after I did.”

“I think…I think I need to be with the land, for a while, away from everything,” Castiel said slowly. He pulled the soil back over the seeds as he talked, burying his fingers in the earth to feel it ground him.

“When are you leaving?” she asked.

Castiel swallowed. “Late tonight.”

Meg nodded. “Alright. Well, good luck. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Castiel looked at her. Meg’s hazel eyes were distant, as if she was already locking him away inside of her memory, making him into nothing more than an amusing story to tell her friends or future children.

“I’m sure I will,” he said. “Can I…can I write to you?”

Some warmth came back into her eyes, but she was still distant. “If you want.”

“I do. Want to,” he promised. “I want…after all of this is over, when I’m better, I want to try. I want to see you.”

She sighed. “Cas, it’s no big deal, really. What happened with us, it was just a lapse in judgement. We don’t even _know_ each other that well.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll write, and I’ll come see you, after.”

Meg shrugged. “You can write, if you like. I can’t promise I’ll answer, though.”

“I can’t fault you for that.”

.

The bus ride was long. Castiel slept most of the way. No one was there to meet him at the station, either. Instead, Castiel simply slung his duffle bag over his shoulder and began to walk, following the directions that Gabriel had given him. On the way out of town, he saw a payphone. He’d written his mother another letter before he’d gone, and Meg had promised to deliver it. Still, he wanted to call her, to hear her voice one more time.

Digging through his pockets, he found some changed and dialed, almost praying that she wouldn’t answer. But she did.

“Naomi Novak speaking. How can I help you?”

Castiel took a deep breath. Despite everything, it was good to hear her voice. “Hey, mom.”

“Castiel? Where are you? I’m coming to get you right now! How could you do this to us? Do you know how worried I’ve been? And Gabriel refuses to tell me anything, and I’m sure that Masters girl knows something, but her father wouldn’t say anything,” Naomi rambled. “Castiel, why aren’t you answering me? Castiel!”

“Mom, I’m okay. I’m out by Hael and Alfie. I’m going to stay here for a while. I’m not going to medical school. I don’t know if I do want to go. But I need to be away from everything for a little while. I wanted to be the one to tell you. I love you, and I love dad, but I need to do this by myself, and I need to figure out what I want. I’m sorry for disappointing you.” Castiel took another deep breath, and gripped the phone has hard as he could to stop his hand shaking. “I’ll call you when I can. Goodbye.”

He hung up before Naomi could say anything else. Breathing hard, he leaned against the phone for a moment before he straightened, shook his head, and began to walk again, heading in the direction of the farm.

He walked for two hours before a truck came by and offered him a ride. Even when they dropped him at the entrance to the farm, it was still a good twenty minute walk to reach the main buildings. A few people bustled here and there, either working on personal projects or chores. None of them paid him any mind.

Castiel spotted his sister emerging from a low building, a basket hanging from her arm. Hael was wearing a pair of ratty jeans and a bright orange t-shirt, a cardigan slung over her shoulders to ward off the early morning chill. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see him.

“Hello, Hael,” he said.

She smiled. “You came after all.”

“Yes. I wanted to get away, and I thought I could learn some things here. I don’t have many hobbies.”

“Let me just put these eggs where they belong and we’ll find you something to do, then,” Hael said. “We’ll find you somewhere to sleep, too.”

“I think I would be good at helping in the garden,” he suggested. “I can’t do heavy work yet, but I can do other things.”

“I’m sure we can find something that will suit,” Hael promised. “Now, come on. We need to get these eggs to the kitchen.”

.

Groaning, Meg settled herself on the back steps and lit a cigarette. It was warm out, with summer just starting to settle in once again, far too warm for her to be wearing her suit. But it was cold in the house, as it always was when they had a service. Stripping out of her jacket, she set it behind her and fanned herself with her hand.

It had been over a year since Castiel had come and gone from her house. She’d gotten letters from him pretty regularly, but had only written him back a couple of times. Her father corresponded with him regularly, she knew, sending almost as many letters back and he received. He liked the boy, he said, and hoped that he would come and visit again.

She hadn’t been able to bring herself to write him back much. She mostly wanted to forget what had happened, to forget the man with bright blue eyes that had stumbled into her funeral home and lay down on her table and asked her to tell him about embalming.

“Those things will kill you, you know.”

Meg jumped and turned to look toward the source of the voice. Castiel stood there, his duffle bag slung over his shoulder. It looked worse for the wear, frayed and patched, but the man carrying it looked healthier than ever. His shoulders had broadened during his time away and his skin had a sun kissed glow. The muscles in his arms were more defined, and there was a light brush of stubble on his chin. He stood there next to the flowers that she’d painstakingly kept alive after he’d left, looking at her with his too-big blue eyes. There was a bundle of daffodils clenched in his left hand.

“Everything will kill you eventually,” she answered.

Castiel smiled at her. “Yes, I suppose it will.”

He walked closer to the steps, but stopped just before he reached them, as if he was afraid that she would refuse to let him sit. Instead, Meg simply moved over and patted the space next to him. Castiel sat. He set his daffodils on the ground between them.

“So, you came back,” she said quietly. Castiel nodded and looked down at his hands. Meg did, too, noticing that there were new scars and callouses on his palms and fingers.

“I did,” he said just as quietly.

“You didn’t say anything about it in your last letter.”

“So you’ve read them, then.”

“I did. I just didn’t have anything to say.”

“You tended the garden well,” Castiel observed. “Looks like you didn’t inherit your father’s black thumb after all.”

“You worked so hard on making it look nice and the planting. I thought it a shame to let it all die,” she said. “Why are you here? When did you get back?”

“I got back a few days ago,” he told her. “I wanted to get some things squared away before I came to see you and your father.”

“So, you found what you were looking for at the farm?”

Castiel nodded. “I did, actually. It was a lot of physical work, and I did a lot of things. But I really do have a knack for flowers. Fruits and vegetables, too, according to my sister, but I like flowers the most. There’s something about working with the soil that makes me feel…calm and complete. But I also learned some woodworking, and I helped with the animals as well, although I can’t say that I was quite successful with them.”

“So, you’ve come back to go to school?” Meg pressed.

Castiel shook his head. “No, no. I’ve…I don’t think I can handle that responsibility. Holding a human life in my hand like that. I do have a different job, however, one that I think I’ll enjoy much more. Mr. Henderson hired me.”

Meg blinked. “The florist?”

He nodded. “Yes. I’m going to go to the community college in the fall to get an official certificate for it, but I’m going to be starting on Monday. He’ll show me what I need to know and get me started. So I suppose we’ll be seeing a bit of each other.”

“I suppose so,” Meg said. People bought flowers for funerals all the time and Meg herself bought them to bring to her mother’s grave or to brighten up the house. It hadn’t felt right, cutting the ones that Castiel had planted to use for decoration.

“There’s another thing,” Castiel said. “I was actually hoping you would let me stay here for a few days. I went to see my mother when I got back and she wasn’t exactly, ah, thrilled with me. I think we’ll be alright eventually, but for now I should stay way. Give her time.”

“Where have you been staying then?”

“Oh, the motel.”

“And you walked here?”

Castiel shook his head. “I took my bike.”

Before either of them could say anything else, the back door swung open. Azazel didn’t seem surprised at all to see Castiel standing there.

“Meg, do you know how rude it is to keep a guest standing on the back porch? And in this heat no less?” he chided. “Why don’t you come in, son? I made some iced tea yesterday, and Meg and I made a delightful coffee cake.”

Castiel struggled to keep from laughing. “That sounds delicious, sir.”

Azazel simply nodded and puttered back into the house, leaning heavily on his cane. Meg rolled her eyes and shook her head.

“I suppose we better go in, then,” she said. Meg stood and went to walk through the door, only to feel Castiel grab her elbow and spin her around to pull her in for a kiss.

His lips were warm, as they had been the last time, and were slightly chapped. There was something different about it, though, and it wasn’t just that his grip on her was stronger. His kiss felt more sure, more _right,_ than it had felt a year ago.

When he pulled away, Meg looked up into his eyes.

“Miss Masters, I would very much like to take you out for a coffee, or maybe a picnic,” he said, handing her the flowers.

Despite herself, Meg felt her face bloom into a smile as she took the blossoms from him. “I’d like that.”

Castiel nodded. “Good. Now, I think we should go inside before your father comes looking for us again.”

Laughing, Meg took his hand and led him into the house. She wasn’t sure if this would work. They had been apart for too long, barely knew each other, and had little connection aside from their deaths and resurrections and the bond they had formed when they both sat on a cold, metal table and talked about embalming.

But his hand was warm and alive in her own. His pulse throbbed under her fingers and she felt a strange calm settle over her, a sense of stillness that she hadn’t felt since she’d stood at the edge of the lake where she had died and looked out into the water.

It was simple and easy peace.

So she took his hand and led him into the kitchen and, she hoped, into her life for the foreseeable future.

 

**Author's Note:**

> All inaccuracies regarding the funeral industry (of which there are a lot) are my own. I'm not a mortician I just like to read about human decomposition. Obviously the character's views on the modern funeral industry are not my own (I mean, I do want a green funeral, but that's just me. Embalming and a vault and all that is rad if that's what you want, and so's cremation or anything else you wanna do). The song Castiel sings is "Dem Dry Bones" (also known as Dem Bones or Dry Bones). The one Meg sings is Hearse Song, which can be found in the Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark books. There's also a lovely version on YouTube by Harvey Poe. The timeline in this is left a bit ambiguous. Place it in any year you like that has cell phones and home computers. 
> 
> According to the flower language web site I used, daffodils mean "rebirth" or "new beginning"


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